This chapter considers two overlapping issues: Labour's conception of the economy, and its overall electability. As to the first, it is widely asserted in both academic and political circles that ‘the absence of economic policy credibility was absolutely central to Labour's failure to regain office until 1997’.1 This was certainly true of the 1983 general election when, as Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour remarked, ‘even 28 per cent [of the vote], the party's lowest since 1918, seemed more than the party deserved’.2 By 1987 Giles Radice believed that Labour had ‘managed to convince the electorate that its heart was in the right place … [but they] still doubted whether it had the vision, capacity and competence to shape the future’.3 Indeed, throughout the 1980s, the British people consistently told pollsters both that they expected the economy to get worse over the next 12 months and that the policies of Margaret Thatcher would have a positive effect eventually.4 All this was not merely ‘declinism’ writ large. Once unemployment began to recede (and indeed to motor down from 1987), the Conservatives had a powerful top-line argument that unleashing the market had helped to ‘clear up Labour's mess’, while at the same time the opposition was unable to rebut charges that it would take Britain back to the ‘dark days’ of the 1970s.
The economy was not the only area where Labour lacked credibility. As Andrew Rawnsley summarises, ‘the Labour church has a history of doing the splits. It did so in the 1930s. Again in the 1950s. And again in the 1980s.’5 After 1979, the Bennite left – anti-Common Market, anti-nuclear weapons and pro-nationalisation – grappled for power with the social democratic centre; the split ran through the Limehouse Declaration and beyond, reaching something of a nadir by the time of Neil Kinnock's anti-Militant speech at the 1985 party conference. Although all within Labour and the broader British left could to some degree unite on being anti-Thatcher, what Labour was a vehicle ‘for’ remained more difficult to resolve. Navigating the path between principle and the pursuit of power was not easy. As such, Kinnock's ultimate legacy was in many ways to have taken Labour from a party that 63 per cent of the British public believed to be ‘divided’ in June 1983 to one of which only 24 per cent said similar in March 1992.6 Labour's path from Foot to Blair was not just about two further election defeats, but a gradual realignment of party values and, in short, something of a recovery.7
Given such patterns, this chapter attempts to marry both economic and intra-party analysis through the prism of the pledge to introduce a National Investment Bank (NIB), included in the general election manifestoes of 1983, 1987 and 1992.8 It considers the intellectual history of this idea, the various machinations regarding the similarly corporatist National Enterprise Board of the 1970s, and how the NIB policy not only survived the fiasco of 1983 but remained a key part of Labour's agenda until 1992. As we will see, this policy serves as an exemplar of the way Kinnock managed the Labour Party – providing just enough meat to left and right and allowing both to read into the NIB what they wished it to be. Here the NIB forms a mirror image of Jim Tomlinson's recent analysis of so-called ‘declinism’ in 1970s Conservative thought – a term that had been so ambiguous that it allowed ‘every political tendency to blame their favourite bête noire’ for Britain's then malaise.9 Such linguistic dexterity apart, the fact that the NIB was adopted by Foot, nuanced by Kinnock and summarily ditched by Blair helps us to map Labour as it moved from self-satisfied opposition to the compromises inherent in making a serious bid for office. At this point, it is worth declaring an interest: prior to the resurrection of the policy in Labour's 2015 manifesto, the present author consistently argued for the creation of such an institution – including in a March 2012 report for the think-tank Localis.10 What follows is not so much about the merits or de-merits of the policy, however, as about what such dialogue said of the party and its electoral fortunes.
In terms of political theory, the case for the NIB fell somewhere between the ‘valence’ and ‘position’ designations of voter preference that Donald Stokes articulated in the early 1960s.11 For clarity, ‘valence’ issues denote those where there is broad agreement between parties over the end goal. In this case, although their methods clearly differed, both Labour and Conservative parties at least claimed to be about delivering a better capitalism which gave more people the opportunity to better their lot. Valence politics, in short, is not about wonkish details but about which party the voters believe has the credibility to deliver. Equally, the NIB provides a clear instance of Stokes's ‘position’ politics. Unlike, say, vague calls for ‘a more progressive economy’, the NIB policy had a certain set of precise consequences where voters could make a rational choice for or against. The story of this chapter, the NIB per se, and arguably of Labour itself in the 1980s, is of ‘valence’ politics trumping those of ‘position’. The rational argument for a NIB was relatively clear (if not, as we will see, uncontested); the electorate just did not trust Labour to manage the economy. At the same time, however, in helping to reorient Labour, the NIB policy had positive effects over the long run.
This brief study adds to a still developing historiographical picture. Richard Hill's Long Road Back ably chronicles the path Labour took from the conception of an economy ruled from the commanding heights to the acceptance of a more Rhenish, social market form of capitalism – shifting the party away from William Beveridge and towards Will Hutton. Colin Hays and Dianne Hayter have likewise extended our understanding of the structural shifts in Labour's economic message and the left–right context in which they were conducted.12 But while economics and business studies academics have analysed the failure of British banks to provide long-run capital to small business, and the forerunner institutions which attempted to address this in the post-war period, few historical studies have provided much specific comment on Labour's NIB idea of the 1980s.13 Drawing on both archive material and interviews with key shapers of the policy, this summary intends to redress the balance.14
Importantly, such debates are not the sole preserve of history. The balance between state and private sector has long plagued the British left. While New Labour was criticised for being too cosy with multinational corporations, under Jeremy Corbyn the party would struggle to gain any toehold with business whatsoever.15 The 2010–15 Miliband experiment with European social democracy attempted to strike a balance between these two extremes, with Lord Glasman backing a series of regional investment banks along the lines of the German Sparkassen and Chuka Umunna believing there to be ‘deeper cultural and institutional lessons from the German experience which we should draw on as we seek to build a New Economy fit for the future’.16 In terms of trying to generally retool British capitalism, the Miliband leadership had significant merit. But it had other problems that went beyond the trivia of Miliband's problem in eating a bacon sandwich and proved ultimately unelectable. Resolving the dilemmas outlined in this chapter therefore remains a decisive issue for all considering where Labour goes next.
The concept of a NIB has a long-term pedigree in Westminster politics. In June 1931 the Macmillan Committee proposed a number of interventions to heal British industry, which was still dealing with the immediate consequences of the Wall Street Crash. Most famously, it identified the so-called ‘Macmillan Gap’ – the situation where ‘great difficulty is experienced by the smaller and medium-sized businesses in raising capital [at acceptable rates]’. To get such credit flowing, the committee proposed the creation of a new ‘institution acting as an intermediary between industry and investor … to provide adequate machinery for raising long-dated capital’.17 Members of the committee disagreed as to whether this new institution should be publicly owned (Ernest Bevin was very much in favour), but the need for some form of de facto bank to bridge the gap between businesses that needed to borrow in order to expand (or even just survive) and the low rates that would encourage them to take on such risk was readily acknowledged. The major commercial institutions simply were not doing the job on their own.
After some wartime discussion back and forth between Treasury and Board of Trade departments, one of the less high-profile achievements of Attlee's New Jerusalem was to create two institutions designed to deliver just this. This was not a trend unique to the UK – the Dutch Nationale Investeringsbank (1945) and German Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW, 1948) were among several European bodies formed to address similar market failures. As for Britain, the new Finance Corporation for Industry (FCI) sought ‘to provide finance for large scale long-term investments, aimed at industry wide rationalization’.18 Medium-term loans were provided where ‘finance could not be obtained on reasonable terms elsewhere, and where the “national interest” was served’.19 By the late 1970s, over £240 million of such loans were in operation. Alongside this larger institution, an Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (ICFC) was also set up in 1945 to provide finance for smaller and medium-sized concerns. This latter body was intended to plug a huge gap between the level at which ordinary commercial banks stopped lending to smaller firms and the point at which the big capital markets became seriously interested in providing finance. In the end, the FCI and the ICFC merged in 1973 to form Finance for Industry (FFI, later called 3i), which was eventually privatised in the 1990s.
These institutions performed usefully, but were always ultimately hamstrung. Firstly, they were set up as offshoots of the Bank of England to act as instruments subordinate to the major commercial clearing banks. Indeed, according to Chris Lonsdale, many in the commercial banking sector saw the small business-focused ICFC as but ‘a necessary evil to prevent Labour's original hopes for a fully-fledged national investment bank’.20 Equally, as Richard Coopey notes, the major banks were persuaded to provide funds for the new institution only on the grounds that they could then significantly influence its direction.21 Relations were scarcely better with the Bank of England, which explicitly opposed the ICFC and FCI being used for any ‘political’ purposes such as increased investment in the regions. Advances of sorts did come over time – from 1959 the ICFC was able to raise its own capital through bond and stock issues – but these served to solidify the already de facto independence from the state. Even before merger and later privatisation, the ICFC was a more or less completely self-directing institution acting in its own commercial interest – which, with the various economic travails seen in the 1970s, nudged it further towards short-term ‘wins’ and away from its original rationale. By the mid-1980s the then merged 3i was making less than a thousand new loans a year – dwarfed by the over 20,000 such deals then brokered by the German KfW equivalent. In a further twist, by the 1980s 3i would be in the bizarre situation of having some of its limited lending guaranteed by a European investment bank on whose board sat a British Chancellor arguing that a National Investment Bank was the road to ruin.
The truncated FFI/3i was not the only institution which backers of a NIB had to contend with. Despite most commentators acknowledging the presence of a continuing Macmillan Gap holding back British industry (blunting the intended ‘white heat’ of technological revolution in the 1960s), the recent experience of governments launching arm's-length schemes to suit political ends was not without issue. In 1975 the Wilson government passed an Industry Act mandating the creation of a new, state-owned National Enterprise Board (NEB). As envisaged by its architect, Tony Benn, the aim of the new NEB was to acquire a stake in major manufacturing firms – enabling the government to exercise influence over the said firms’ activities and deliver a return to the Exchequer if, as expected, such investments proved profitable. A 1974 Cabinet memorandum made clear the interventionist aim to ameliorate the cyclical effects of capitalism: the NEB should ‘secure where necessary large scale sustained investment to offset the effects of the short term pull of market forces … and [provide] an instrument through which the government operate directly to create employment in areas of high unemployment’.22
Had the NEB indeed just been about ‘picking winners’, its opponents might have had less opportunity to undermine its credibility. But, as Cabinet memoranda spelled out, ‘it may on occasion be called on to take over an ailing company which is in danger of collapse but needs to be maintained and restored to a sound economic basis for reasons of regional employment or industrial policy’.23 In 1975 the Ryder Report ‘propose[d] that the Government should be prepared to provide £200m in equity capital now and up to £500m in long term loan capital in stages over the period 1976 to 1978’ to one such firm, the automotive giant British Leyland.24 In bringing British Leyland under state ownership – with a pledge to restore the company to profitability by 1981 – the government had taken on the leading player in an industry, automobile manufacturing, which was to experience mass strikes over the late 1970s. Taxpayer funds, in short, were used (or at least, were seen) to pick a loser that government intervention had been unable to turn around. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher continued to remind the public that ‘taxpayers’ grants and guarantees amount to every family giving £200 in assistance to British Leyland and, alas, British Leyland is still in a loss-making condition’.25 The Thatcherite notion of sink or swim did not have much rhetorical use for a state-owned floatation device.
This was important, because it undermined the case for the mixed economy and corporatism per se. From the right, Thatcher was able to claim that government getting out of the way was the only way to turn the British economy around. Looking for cuts going into the 1979 election, the Conservatives pledged to ‘reduce government intervention in industry and particularly that of the National Enterprise Board, whose borrowing powers are planned to reach £4.5 billion’.26 Labour's promise to ‘expand the work and finance of the NEB … and ensure that we get an adequate return on our investment’ certainly gave the electorate a choice, but it was not one that was about to benefit Prime Minister Callaghan.
Importantly, however, failing to find the answers to British Leyland not only bolstered the right, it also served to blunt moderate Labour. As Tony Blair remembers:
Jim Callaghan had been Prime Minister. The Labour Party was [then] put out of power by Margaret Thatcher. And the Labour Party persuaded itself that the reason why the country had voted for Margaret Thatcher was because they wanted a really left wing Labour Party. This is what I call the theory that the electorate is stupid.27
Blair is clearly being somewhat playful here, but there is an underlying point. Just as Thatcher pulled the Overton window of political acceptability to the right, many were unable to reach a coherent explanation as to why she had been able to do so.28 Before (at least) the mid-1980s, the moderates had failed to win the internal battle within Labour over what had gone wrong with Britain in the 1970s, and into this space came Stuart Holland and the ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’ of full employment through borrowing to invest, controls on the international capital market and nationalising the large banks. Not everything about this agenda was wrongheaded, but collectively it saw Labour abdicate the centre ground just as much as the government it pilloried. Some saw no issue with this. In 1980, after the US presidential election, Tony Benn consoled himself with the notion that ‘with Thatcher and Reagan in power, the polarisation, and the choice for British electors, will be clearer’.29 Even after Labour's own electoral catastrophe three years later, the new MP Jeremy Corbyn still ‘didn't want a binge of recrimination. The campaign had started well and then everything had been fudged’.30 Rather than policy errors, there had been ‘great incompetence in the Party machine; the leaflets put out were absolutely bland crap’.31 For many on the left, ‘one more push’ remained the only option. With Benn later believing that Kinnock had ‘reduce[d] public expectations by narrowing the vision of the Party to the single, simple objective of installing Labour ministers in office’32 – suffice it to say, not exactly a trivial goal – projecting competence was far from easy.
With a chasm in the middle of British politics (at least pre- the SDP), the Tories made much early hay. Indeed, once in power, some such as Nigel Lawson and John Redwood were baying for the ailing NEB's blood.33 While its elimination did not happen quite as quickly as they may have liked, all government supporters were generally agreed on what any rump NEB should not do in the 1980s. Thatcher's Industry Secretary, Keith Joseph, saw ‘no public benefit in enabling the NEB to act as a general merchant bank, and its powers to promote businesses, or buy shares in them will be restricted within very clearly defined limits’.34 Strategic intervention was not to be Thatcher's mission. In 1981 the NEB merged with the National Research Development Corporation to form the British Technology Group, whose aim was to commercialise publicly funded developments. As was the case with 3i, even this truncated body would be fully privatised under Major in the 1990s.
Despite a seemingly disadvantageous political climate, the election of Michael Foot as Labour leader in November 1980 meant that the prospect of a ‘Macmillan Gap’-solving National Investment Bank was back on the agenda. For all the New Right attempts to own the economic narrative, this was not without significant political justification. As James Fulcher notes, ‘the single most important fact in understanding 1980s Britain is the decline in industrial profitability in the previous two decades. This, as measured by the net profit rate, fell from 17.5 per cent in 1960 to a low of 1.7 per cent in 1981.’35 Something was going disastrously wrong with British capitalism, and a recalibration was indeed needed. Likewise, the success of the aforementioned analogous institutions to the NIB on the continent was not unknown in Westminster. In late 1980 Nigel Lawson fielded a parliamentary question on the potential for the government to provide preferential interest rates for particular areas of commerce and industry – to help close, in other words, various sectoral Macmillan Gaps. His response acknowledged that ‘there are schemes which apply on a country wide basis in four EEC member States: Germany, France, Italy and Belgium’. He told the House of Commons that in the French case total interest rate subsidies for particular industries in 1979 had amounted to about 3.1 billion francs (0.6 per cent of total budget expenditure). Rejecting such a course, however, he noted that ‘the Government would inevitably have to subsidise, either directly or indirectly, lower interest rates for industry, thus adding to the public sector borrowing requirement’.36 In the wake of Labour's going ‘cap in hand’ to the IMF in 1976, this was no small argument, but the fact was that it had once again become an argument.
Crucially, under Foot the NIB policy was driven by the far left of the labour movement. In September 1981 Les Wood, general secretary of the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians, stated that pension funds should be nationalised if their trustees refused to use them to aid British industry: ‘we do not want a national investment bank to become a second cousin of Giro’; instead, ‘we want it to provide jobs for people’.37 Earlier that summer, the left-winger John Silkin had included a proposal for the NIB as a key platform of his (unsuccessful) deputy leadership campaign. And at the Labour Party conference of 1982 the hard left almost succeeded in gaining support for the entire nationalisation of Britain's banking industry – with a conference measure failing only by 3,361,000 votes to 3,131,000.38 Uncharitably put, perhaps, but with friends like those, the policy did not particularly need Conservative enemies.
With the policy's inclusion in Labour's 1983 election manifesto, however, it soon got them. Since the arguments did not shift much over the decade, it is worth sketching out the Conservative rebuttal. Firstly, the government denied that the problem the NIB was intended to solve existed at all: ‘there is no shortage of capital for viable investment projects in industry nor of institutions ready to invest it. Therefore the only point of the National Investment Bank would be to provide … help for the undeserving.’39 Nineteen-eighties Britain had no ‘Macmillan Gap’. The capital markets were providing worthwhile funding, and thus the whole notion was statist tinkering, at best, and downright harmful if it crowded out private lending, at worst.
Secondly, the NIB idea was linked to Labour's concurrent manifesto threat to nationalise one (or more) of the ‘big-four’ clearing banks. Such a nationalisation would have involved a significant sum: the then stock exchange value of the Midland exceeded £600 million and that of Barclays £1.5 billion.40 Though the Tories conceded that the costs of setting up a NIB were ‘unquantifiable’, the sums involved might well have been higher than even these. People may have been growing gradually more sceptical of bankers, but entrusting their money to Michael Foot instead was a leap too far. By Labour's threatening to nationalise a major bank to make way for the NIB, the NIB became less about facilitating productive capitalism and more about the state encroaching into the private sphere. After the experience of the 1970s this was a big leap of faith for some sections of the electorate to take.
And thirdly, as Conservative literature noted, while ‘the market value of [UK] pension funds is about £70 billion – a proportion of this money has been “targeted” by the Labour Party for directed investment through the National Investment Bank’. With ‘11.6 million employees … members of occupational pension schemes – over half the working population’ – the implication was that Labour was about to raid people's hard-earned pension pots to subsidise another failing British Leyland.41 And, as the Tories hammered home, ‘industrialists, not bureaucrats or committees of “wise men”, are best placed to determine which investment opportunities are profitable and will create jobs’.42 The NIB was an example of Labour not only being about to hit high earners through potentially punitive upper rates of income tax, but getting its myopic cronies to mismanage workers’ pensions too.
So, how did the idea survive the debacle of 1983? Aside from similar admiration held by many Labour moderates for the Japanese MITI, part of the answer lies in the pro-European direction in which Kinnock took the party.43 Today, Lord Charles Williams remembers that ‘some of us Europhiles were admiring (envious) of the German model, particularly the Landesbanks, and thought we could do the same here. The argument was not to find a way of being nice to capitalists but to show that within the boundaries of Clause IV we could do what the capitalists could not because of “short termism” in the capital markets.’44 In December 1985 shadow chancellor Roy Hattersley noted, ‘it is Labour Party policy to create an industrial bank of the sort that has been successful in Germany, Japan, Sweden, and other Scandinavian countries’.45 Hattersley was a consistent voice for internationalism, and urged Kinnock not to seem to advocate a ‘siege economy’ like Foot. As the shadow chancellor admitted, however, the difficulty with ‘organis[ing] a new [global] economic order’ was that ‘Reagan will still be President’.46
Yet Europe remained a beacon of possibilities, and not just in terms of individual member states. Between 1980 and 1990 the total level of new financing provided by the European Investment Bank (EIB) in Luxembourg increased from 3.5 billion ECU (European Currency Units) to 13.4 billion ECU.47 This had clear ramifications in the UK – from £417 million worth of loans being issued to UK projects in 1980, by 1989 the amount was approaching £1.1 billion (the UK was second only behind Italy in terms of investment received).48 Big-ticket items in the late 1980s included £190 million towards the nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Sellafield, £50 million for the development of the Airbus A-320 aeroplane, £100 million for British aerospace and £200 million for Scottish communications. Significant EIB money also went towards the Channel Tunnel and the development of Stansted airport.49 The EIB was certainly not without critics and, as Thatcher attempted to negotiate Britain's rebate from the European Community, any financial loss that Britain made to Europe was heavily scrutinised. Indeed, between 1988 and 1991 the UK's total subscription to the EIB was a sizeable 5.5 billion ECU. But with the collapse of communism this money soon assumed a geopolitical importance – even the Conservative manifesto of 1992 spoke of Britain's being ‘at the forefront of investing in the markets of Central and Eastern Europe’.50 Regardless, throughout the 1980s the UK was increasingly part of a scheme to utilise British taxpayers’ money to fund and guarantee lending to small, medium and larger businesses across the European continent (and beyond). This did not stop Tory attacks on Labour's attempts to implement a British version of the EIB, but it blunted them. Subsidised lending was happening, and British businesses and infrastructure projects alike were benefiting from it.
Policy precedent apart, one cannot ignore the internal and very personal dimension for Neil Kinnock. As Richard Hill notes, between his election as leader in 1983 and the conference speech of 1985 where he lambasted the Militant Tendency, Kinnock's room for manoeuvre was limited indeed.51 His defeat at the 1984 party conference over ‘One Member One Vote’ was particularly salutary, and policies which advanced his own views but could be cloaked in the language of the left were vital during this period. Crucially, the idea of some form of government-directed (or at least influenced) investment bank could mean different things to different people. For some on the left, after 1983 the major problem with the NIB was that the policy did not go far enough. Presenting a paper to the broadly leftist Campaign for Labour Democracy faction in 1985, the Oxford economist (and Trotskyist) Andrew Glyn argued that ‘the National Investment Bank, currently proposed by Labour to be funded from repatriated overseas investments and directed towards small and medium firms could make a contribution, but in no way would it guarantee a major expansion of investment’.52 This was symbolic, he continued, of ‘Labour's leaders hav[ing] retreated from the ideas of planning and controlling investment, towards attempting to encourage it by reassuring the private sector’. Paul Flynn MP (first elected in 1987) recalls that the ‘left wing were friendly towards the [NIB] idea more so than the right wing’.53 Either way, the policy's malleability was one of its chief assets. For those on the right, the bank was about encouraging capital flows to productive capitalism – providing succour, as Flynn states, to the ‘give greed a chance’ brigade.54 Concurrently, to those on the left it was about bringing the City to heel, plugging the gaps the big banks were refusing to act on, and bringing industry back under state control.
As Bryan Gould noted to the present author, the NIB question was very much tied to ‘the issue as to what to commit a new Labour government to do in respect of the formerly nationalised industries, such as BT, that the Tories had in various ways privatised. The unions … were keen to push for a commitment to re-nationalise, but the PLP members wanted to avoid that commitment’. Much of Gould's time in his shadow economic portfolios in the late 1980s was spent ‘persuading the unions to accept a form of partial public ownership, such as – in the case of BT for example – obtaining a majority shareholding. It was in the context of that kind of discussion that the concept of a publicly owned investment bank was developed.’55 Shifting the Labour Party on industrial policy and nationalisation was about restoring Labour's ‘valence’ to the electorate – here the NIB formed part of the retail offer as such, but it was also not a policy that existed in a vacuum. Just as the Tories had tied the NIB to nationalisation of the major banks in 1983, so too did it not remain divorced from the remainder of Labour economic policy throughout the 1980s. Indeed, the sheer plethora of promised new institutions in areas from pricing to the regions was not always helpful (particularly a new ‘British Enterprise’ intended as a de facto resurrection of the 1970s NEB), but within the labour movement they could serve useful purposes with different stakeholders. Gradually moving Labour thought from owning the means of production to facilitating responsible capitalism was a process that took time.
As the party became generally more credible, however, so did Kinnock's version of the NIB – and nuancing the vexed funding issue was key here. In 1986 Kinnock explicitly sent out the signal that his NIB was ‘not … an agency for channelling all national savings’.56 To fund a bank capitalised to the tune of a potential £12 billion, he retained the general principle from 1983 of withdrawing tax privileges from pooled investment schemes which did not limit their overseas portfolio to a given percentage, and from those managed funds which did not allocate a stated proportion of their portfolio to loan stock of the NIB. However, all questions of nationalisation of pension funds, uncooperative banks and so forth were dropped – the policy would rely on incentives and providing nudges for market participants to act in the national interest. And, as a further fudge, the party's commitment to raise additional income tax from those earning over £20,000 was also occasionally dangled as a source of funding for the NIB – particularly as revenue from another potential avenue, North Sea oil, dried up from the mid-1980s.
The trade-off here was again between valence and positional politics. If, as it indeed did, Labour highlighted particular ways to pay for the NIB, this meant highlighting groups who might fear losing out (i.e., pensioners) and thereby gaining new ‘positional’ enemies.57 Equally, however, if no source of funds was identified for the NIB, this meant undermining the party's valence with the electorate per se. Although we will never know the outcome of a NIBless 1987, the actual result perhaps vindicates taking what positional hit there was. In the end, in 1987 Labour gained around 4 per cent more voters over the age of fifty-five (those of pensionable or approaching pensionable age) on their 1983 performance – compared to an overall swing of just over 3 per cent between the two elections.58 Conservative attack-dogs such as Norman Tebbit, sent out to claim that Labour intended to ‘rob the pensioners’, had limited success.59 Given that such pension funds would be buying bonds in any NIB (likely providing a higher rate than gilts, too) and not taking an equity stake, the Conservative rebuttal in this regard was always half baked at best.
Funding remained a key question, however, and, interestingly, one advocate of directly hypothecating taxes was Tony Blair. In a private paper he pointed to the success of Walter Mondale in winning the Democratic nomination for US president in 1984. One of the biggest charges facing Labour, Blair contended, was Mondale's question to his then rival, Gary Hart: ‘where's the beef?’ Although he argued that ‘the scope from taking from “the wealthy” and giving to “the poor” is not unlimited’, hypothecating taxes was certainly an option. Blair wrote that ‘spending on industry, through grants, subsidies, training for industry etc. should again come, as far as is feasible, from raising corporate taxes on industry … [which] are actually low compared with our competitors’.60 Whether Labour's ambitions were big or small, the important thing was to be seen to be realistically able to pay for them. In 1983 Labour, rather foreshadowing 1992, had been accused of more than £26.5 billion of additional spending commitments where the sums did not yet add up.61 As Peter Mandelson noted, Labour should be careful that ‘when talking of our programme we don't promise more than we can deliver or can afford, distinguish between immediate priorities and longer-term goals, aspire to a 10–15 year horizon, and we declare all this openly’.62 The NIB fitted into such long-term horizons.
But if tax might be needed to fund its upfront costs, the NIB was a part of a more significant transition towards the ‘supply side socialism’ advocated by John Eatwell, Kinnock's chief economic advisor. According to Martin Westlake, ‘for Eatwell, Britain's key economic problem was the weakness of its productive sector. This imposed long-term constraints on possible rates of growth since, when consumption spending rose, imports inevitably increased and pushed the economy into a Balance of Payments deficit.’63 As a Labour press briefing put it in 1989, ‘we have now moved decisively away from a policy of short-term management of the economy through demand management’.64 Instead of manipulations of exchange or interest rates, or standard leftist fiscal measures on tax and spend, ‘supply side socialism’ would seek to fix the structural flaws in the British economy over the medium to long term and grow Britain's way to prosperity. As party advisors told journalists, Labour was now about ‘the enabling state … [where] the aim is not to pick winners but to create the conditions in which winners can come through’.65
Further intellectual ballast came from the Kaldor Group – a group of academics commissioned by Kinnock to rethink Labour's economic priorities. Headed by Nicholas Kaldor and attended by Meghnad Desai, John Eatwell, Andrew Graham and others, the group was convinced of the pressing Macmillan Gap going into the mid-1980s. Although the group was mostly macro focused, it noted that
[the] characteristics of the UK capital market militate against … two situations in particular. One is the small/medium size firm needing external finance to grow rapidly. During rapid expansion the investment needs are often equal to, or greater than profits. There is therefore no chance during this period of paying high nominal interest rates or high dividends. The other is the medium/large firm with outdated capital and low profitability, but with good plans for substantial modernisation on a scale that again requires additional external finance. We envisage cases of these two kinds as being especially suitable for support by the proposed National Investment Bank.66
The enemy here was predatory, short-term capitalism. As Bryan Gould told a Cambridge audience, ‘as long as economic policy making is dominated by the interests of those who hold assets rather than create wealth we shall continue to suffer from chronic short termism and the high interest rates and uncompetitive currency that reflect and accompany it’.67 This meant a realignment of capitalism, but not its fundamental replacement. As Kinnock put it, ‘we have a particular financial system which in its own terms is successful. And we have an unsuccessful industrial sector. Given the role which finance has in a capitalist economy of mobilizing resources – and must have in any economy fuelling production – there must be some causal relationship between the relative success of one and the relative failure of the other.’68 Expressed more concisely, Kinnock believed that ‘British financial institutions … should be midwives, instead they are undertakers’.69 Tactics aside, therefore, getting credit flowing was not merely about internal party management. As John Smith argued in his response to the 1985 budget, ‘the Tory party has become the anti-industry party. It is the party of fast food services and of financial services … [and] the jobs of the future [under a Conservative government] will be not so much low-tech as no-tech’.70
John Eatwell concurs with this point. Above and beyond plugging the Macmillan Gap, the NIB was an asset because it could help to address the crucial question of technological development while, at the same time, there was the financial expertise around to staff the operation effectively. As to the first, although British Leyland had previously been something of an albatross around Labour's neck, the innovation seen in car manufacturing throughout the 1980s was evidence to many within Kinnock's office that they ‘had to back such highly skilled consultative expertise in the automotive sector’.71 This was also true of aerospace, where, as Kaveh Pourvand notes, ‘various government interventions have been crucial to [its] present day success’.72 Selling such British expertise to the world was something to be encouraged and, while the Thatcher government had utilised tax incentives to bring in foreign investment (including Nissan in Sunderland), it was felt that far more could be done to capitalise on Britain's competitive advantage in such markets. Equally the NIB could contribute to this, Eatwell remembers, because of the presence of many ‘really talented investment bankers who had often been trained, as younger men, at the Wilson era Industrial Reorganisation Committee [which had encouraged mergers to produce a more efficient industrial base]’.73 These were ‘often quite conservative people, who had been given responsibility at a young age and had a real practical expertise that could have been brought in [to the NIB]’.74 Socialising the financial expertise held within the City was held to be both practical and deliverable.
As such, there were clear wins during this period. In May 1985 Smith was able to seize on a recent speech of Nicholas Edwards, then Welsh Secretary, to Cardiff Business Club. Edwards, no paid-up Wet, had argued that there was a ‘physical chasm’ between the City of London and Britain's industrial areas. Edwards had also stated that ‘among many household names in the financial world, there is at best a failure to comprehend the problem … and at worst a startling arrogance that leads them to conclude that all is well, that nothing calls for reform, and that anyone with a good project can always find backing for it’.75 Pouring praise on Edwards, Smith contrasted his speech with ‘the objections of some Conservative Members [which] arise from the fact that they think the City already provides adequately for the needs of British industry’. Labour's broad diagnosis was not without prominent third-party backing, either. In October 1986 the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) called for £1 billion of new infrastructure investment and criticised the halving of capital expenditure as a percentage of overall government investment between 1980/81 and 1985/86. As the CBI noted, ‘unless the government takes the initiative now on certain capital projects we shall have lost our chance and slip further behind in the [global] competitiveness league’.76 The narrative was not wholly slavishly Thatcherite.
In this light, and with Reaganomics then clearly in the ascendancy, it is also worth revisiting the coverage of the NIB in North American newspapers. In February 1986 the New York Times, referencing the British press, noted that ‘the new Labor [sic] remedies – lower interest rates, competitive exchange rates, a national investment bank, sponsoring technology – sound so prudent and uncontroversial that The Daily Telegraph, a Tory paper, asked ironically whether there was a “convergence” between Labor [sic] and Conservative policies’.77 In the immediate run-up to the 1987 election, the Boston Globe noted that ‘Labor [sic] also would … impose a “capital repatriation” program to keep savings and investment from going abroad, coupling that with an industrial investment bank for low-cost business loans. But the party promises to renationalise only the gas and telephone companies in its first parliament of five years. That represents a Kinnock victory over the left in his party.’78 After Labour's election defeat, Toronto readers of The Globe and Mail could read of the policy review then underway which had ‘several proposals including an industrial investment bank, a more effective science policy and better retraining programs. But [Labour] resolutely reject heavy intervention in the economy and protectionism.’79 These are only snapshots, but the threefold picture of a moderate policy bolstering a centrist leader who was about strategic rather than blanket intervention was broadly accurate. In this regard, Labour was making some of the progress envisioned by the Democratic Leadership Council in America – which would eventually deliver the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992.80
If 1983–85 saw Kinnock bob and weave within the party, and 1985–87 witnessed a gradual centrist drift, the two-year period after the election defeat in 1987 cemented the victory of the moderate tendency. According to Labour's communications team considering the latest defeat, it was clear that ‘the Conservatives won the election on economic grounds’ and there were continuing ‘perceptions of Labour's lack of economic competence’. There was a need, these documents continued, not to make the message ‘too abstract’ and to ‘engage the interest of both politicians and the general public’.81 Slightly ironically, this process began with the ultra-wonkish process of a party policy review. For Westlake, ‘the Labour Party's 1987–9 policy review was the most comprehensive and systematic attempt ever undertaken by a political party to reformulate its policies … in theory, each of the policy review groups operated from a blank sheet – in effect a moderniser's charter – but in reality the reforms that emerged were less radical and more cautious than Kinnock’.82 This review involved subtly shifting the NIB once again.
Prior to 1987 one important change had already been made – Labour had dropped the previous requirement for all lending from the NIB to be subject to firms providing a ‘business plan agreed between Government, management, and work-force’. This had helped to blunt charges that ‘what [Hattersley] wants to do is bully financial institutions’.83 But in the wake of the 1987 defeat the bank's remit was again changed. By March 1989 Kinnock was able to state that the NIB would ‘back investment that captures markets … it will be a creative force that invests, builds, and then moves on’.84 Ken Livingstone and others on the left were opposed to this recalibration of aims.85 Yet, for revisionists like Giles Radice, ‘if it is to be serious about winning … [Labour] cannot afford to be primarily a class party … Labour should be, and be seen to be, a broad based national party, concerned with national solutions for national problems’.86 The evolving NIB was a significant part of this.
By placing the NIB on a more strategic footing, Labour could be more confident going into 1992. Taking two sometimes sceptical newspapers as indicative – The Times (1983–87: three critical headlines; 1987–92: zero) and Glasgow Herald (1983–87: six critical headlines; 1987–92: zero) – both calmed their ire with regard to Labour's NIB proposal. By 1991 shadow chancellor John Smith was even taking criticisms head on. When speaking in the City he was asked by a representative of the then ailing Prudential insurance fund whether it was wise to create a NIB, since ‘governments have a rather poor track record in selecting profitable areas for investment’. Smith jovially countered that ‘the private sector has made its share of dodgy decisions, too. D’you know, hard though this is to believe, I understand that a substantial British insurance company went headlong into the property market not so long ago.’ The Times even drily headlined the account of this incident, ‘Pru-dent Silence’.87 Smith had good reason to be bullish. Earlier that year the influential National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) had argued that ‘the provision of long time finance through a national investment bank’ within Labour's programme could, alongside other measures, help to bring growth of over 3 per cent and maintain inflation at a stable 2 per cent.88 And the global picture was also moving to the policy's advantage. By January 1992 the unemployment rates of European states operating institutions closest to the proposed NIB were 6 per cent in Germany, 5.6 per cent in the Netherlands and 4.3 per cent in Sweden.89 These low figures were no doubt largely due to macro-economic factors above and beyond any domestic NIBs, but with a UK unemployment rate of 9.3 per cent (and climbing) Tory charges about the evils of Rhenish capitalism could be batted off.
By February 1992, NOP polling showed that Labour's broad suite of industrial policies, of which the NIB was a big part, had been effectively drawn. Labour was viewed as the party best at ‘getting the economy out of recession’ (29 per cent to 24 per cent), reducing unemployment (37 per cent to 11 per cent), helping the manufacturing industry (49 per cent to 21 per cent) and was neck and neck as to ‘which party will run the economy well’ (45 per cent to 45 per cent).90 Yet ‘supply side socialism’ was not everything, and it was roughly at this point that the Conservative message regarding ‘Labour's tax bombshell’ began to filter through. With Tory posters proclaiming an additional £1,250 on the tax bill of every British taxpayer in the wake of a Labour victory, the subtleties of retooling British capitalism through a NIB were not able to push Kinnock to victory. A fourth election on the bounce (the third with a pledge to introduce a NIB) was duly lost.
The case of the NIB is informative in three overlapping regards. Firstly, it helps us understand how Labour talked to itself. The NIB's long-term rationale, after all, was to fix a particular flaw in capitalist systems: the Macmillan Gap of banks not lending to the right places. To fund such beneficial activity one could either take a confiscatory approach – raid major investment funds for the capital necessary to fund this greater good – or incentivise such funds to act in a more responsible manner. Until the 1983 general election the unions’ advocacy and a leftist leadership collectively ensured that Labour took the former approach, while after that election Hattersley, Gould, Eatwell and others nudged the party towards the latter. Even if it would not figure in the New Labour platform, the NIB's role in the transition of the party – away from ‘national’ solutions and towards ones where it was prepared to talk to ‘investment banks’ – renders it as a significant juncture in the party's history.
Secondly, the NIB tells us much about Labour's outward electability. The 1980s saw Labour gradually shift from the perception that they were blinkered statist blunderers to one where people could see them as semi-credible managers of the public purse. To return to Stokes, in 1983 Labour's advocacy of the NIB suffered both a ‘valence’ and a ‘positional’ problem: few thought that it could govern effectively, and there was the direct (if exaggerated) prospect for some pensioners that they would see their future returns hit. Kinnock gradually restored a semblance of ‘valence’ to Labour on the economy and thus its ability to deliver an effective NIB. Positional attacks from the Conservatives and their sympathetic allies in the press cut through somewhat between 1985–87, but thereafter, partially due to Labour's shift towards supply-side socialism and the strategic state generally (allied to the declining fortunes of the government itself), the NIB was both a viable and a beneficial part of the Kinnock platform. The shifting nuances in the policy also provided a dog-whistle of sorts for the fact that the party had changed from 1983: no bad thing, and certainly something not universally achieved with regard to tax and spend. Had the party won in 1992 the trick would have been for the NIB to avoid the fate of 3i, and to keep an independent NIB focused on national priorities rather than its own bottom line. But with the appointment of a sympathetic top team (the Spectator speculated that Charles Williams might be in line to lead the NIB), day-to-day independence while keeping an eye on overarching national priorities was not beyond the realms of possibility.91 The Bank of England essentially walks such a line today.
Lastly, the NIB is also instructive regarding the birth of New Labour. As noted, through its intellectual roots in 1970s Tony Benn and the Foot leadership, backing the NIB after 1983 helped Kinnock to move Labour towards the centre. And, importantly, the modernisers were watching intently for opportunities to shift the discourse further. They may not all have bought the NIB wholesale (although Blair and Prescott backed it publicly), but they benefitted from its shifting the political terrain in their favour.92 By 1994 Labour had found the revisionist leader that Giles Radice demanded, one willing to ‘accept the market but uphold the case for selective state intervention’.93 In pledging that ‘the war on inflation is a Labour war’, and later not to raise the top rate of income tax, New Labour broadly got the economic mood music right in opposition.94 But one unfortunate casualty of the belief that ‘the era of the corporatist state intervention is over’ was the relatively moderate NIB.95 In a sense, for Tony Blair, in changing the party the NIB idea had served its purpose. And as a man about ends rather than means, he chose other means to change the country.
1 Richard Hill, The Labour Party and Economic Strategy 1979–97: The Long Road Back (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 4.
2 Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour, Labour Rebuilt: The New Model Party (London: Fourth Estate, 1990), p. 6.
3 Giles Radice, Labour's Path to Power: The New Revisionism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 57.
4 See, for example, Ipsos MORI's ‘Economic Optimism Index’.
5 Guardian, 2 August 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/02/labour-split-corbyn-blairites (accessed 14 January 2017).
6 Ipsos MORI, ‘Polls on Labour Party's Image’, 1983–92.
7 To contextualise the success of Kinnock, see Charles Clarke, ‘Measuring the Success or Failure of Labour Leaders: The General Election Test’, in Charles Clarke and Toby S. James (eds), British Labour Leaders (London: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 33–52.
8 A note is necessary on the nomenclature: in the 1987 manifesto this institution was called a ‘British Industrial Investment Bank’. To further complicate matters, in his 1986 Making Our Way: Investing in Britain's Future (London: Basil Blackwell), Kinnock referred to it as the ‘British Investment Bank’.
9 Jim Tomlinson, ‘Thatcherism, Monetarism and the Politics of Inflation’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds), Making Thatcher's Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 62–77, at p. 70.
10 Richard Carr, Credit Where Credit's Due: Investing in Local Infrastructure to Get Britain Growing (London: Localis, 2012). See also Nick Tott, The Case for a British Investment Bank: A Report of Labour's Policy Review (London: Labour Party, 2012), and, utilising a different funding model, Richard Carr, ‘Tackling the “Money Octopus”: The Financial Sector and the One Nation Tradition’, Renewal 23 (2015), 30–43.
11 Donald E. Stokes, ‘Spatial Models of Party Competition’, American Political Science Review 57 (1963), 368–77.
12 Colin Hays, The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under False Pretences? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Dianne Hayter, Fightback! Labour's Traditional Right in the 1970s and 1980s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
13 From an economic standpoint, see Richard Coopey, ‘The First Venture Capitalist: Financing Development in Britain After 1945: The Case of ICFC/3i’, Business and Economic History 23 (1994), 262–71.
14 Thanks are due to Lords John Eatwell and Charles Williams, Paul Flynn MP and Bryan Gould for their comments.
15 Given the extent to which it is repeated, it is worth laying out in full Peter Mandelson's famous quote. New Labour was indeed ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. However, this was always ‘as long as they pay their taxes’.
16 See Guardian, 14 March 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/mar/14/ed-miliband-network-local-banks and Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/9101672/If-we-want-the-UK-to-grow-we-should-take-lessons-from-Germany.html (both accessed 14 January 2017).
17 Committee on Finance and Industry Report, June 1931, The National Archives (TNA), London, T/200/7.
18 Coopey, ‘The First Venture Capitalist’, p. 264.
19 William A. Thomas, The Finance of British Industry, 1918–1976 (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 334.
20 Chris Lonsdale, The UK Equity Gap: The Failure of Government Policy since 1945 (Farnham: Ashgate, 1997), p. 40.
21 Coopey, ‘The First Venture Capitalist’, p. 264.
22 Planning Agreement and the National Enterprise Board, 1 August 1974, TNA, CAB/129/178/13.
23 Planning Agreement and the National Enterprise Board, 1 August 1974, TNA, CAB/129/178/13.
24 ‘British Leyland: The Ryder Report’, 23 April 1975, TNA, CAB/129/183/3.
25 House of Commons Debates, 20 February 1986, 92, col. 477.
26 Conservative Party Manifesto, 1979.
27 Tony Blair in conversation with Matt Forde, 22 July 2015, available at www.progressonline.org.uk (accessed 14 January 2017).
28 The Overton window defines the window of policy options which the public will accept. As defined in Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It (London: Penguin, 2014), Foreword.
29 Tony Benn, The End of An Era: Diaries 1980–90 (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 44 [5 November 1980].
30 Benn, The End of An Era, p. 296 [12 June 1983].
31 Benn, The End of An Era, p. 296 [12 June 1983].
32 Benn, The End of an Era, p. xi.
33 Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam, 1992), p. 90; Michael Grylls and John Redwood, National Enterprise Board: A Case for Euthanasia (London: Centre for Policy Studies, 1980).
34 Keith Joseph statement draft, 18 July 1979, TNA, PREM/19/260 f114.
35 James Fulcher, ‘British Capitalism in the 1980s: Old Times or New Times?’, British Journal of Sociology 46 (1995), 326–38.
36 House of Commons Debates, 13 November 1980, 992, cols 445–7.
37 Glasgow Herald, 11 September 1981, p. 9.
38 Glasgow Herald, 29 September 1982, p. 6.
39 Conservative Research Department Confidential Note, 16 May 1983, Churchill Archives Centre (CAC), THCR 2/7/3/10 f5.
40 ‘Costing Labour's Manifesto Promises’, 25 May 1983, CAC, THCR 2/7/3/15 f9.
41 Conservative Research Department Confidential Note, 16 May 1983, CAC, THCR 2/7/3/10 f5.
42 Conservative Research Department Confidential Note, 16 May 1983, CAC, THCR 2/7/3/10 f5.
43 The Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Technology (MITI) was much admired in the West. See, e.g., Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), passim.
44 Charles Williams to the author, 11 December 2015. In 1987, Lord Williams authored the influential Fabian Society pamphlet, An Investment Bank for the UK.
45 House of Commons Debates, 12 December 1985, 88, col. 1093.
46 Hattersley to Kinnock, 24 October 1985, CAC, KNNK/6/1/7.
47 European Investment Bank Annual Reports, 1980 and 1990.
48 House of Commons Debates, 13 March 1990, 169, cols 160–1.
49 House of Commons Debates, 20 April 1990, 170, cols 1047–50.
50 Conservative Manifesto, 1992.
51 Hill, The Labour Party and Economic Strategy 1979–97, p. 28.
52 Andrew Glynn, ‘A Million Jobs for a Year: The Case for Planning Full Employment’, 3 September 1985 draft, CAC, TADA 4/10/1.
53 Paul Flynn to the author, 9 December 2015.
54 Paul Flynn to the author, 9 December 2015.
55 Bryan Gould to the author, 6 December 2015.
56 Kinnock, Making Our Way, p. 186. My italics.
57 Albeit balanced against positional friends such as small business and, potentially, the unemployed.
58 Ipsos MORI, ‘How Britain Voted since October 1974’.
59 Glasgow Herald, 17 September 1985, p. 7.
60 Tony Blair note on ‘Public Expenditure’, CAC, KNNK/6/1/17
61 ‘Costing Labour's Manifesto Promises’, 25 May 1983, CAC, THCR 2/7/3/15 f9.
62 Mandelson memorandum on General Election Strategy, 27 October 1986, CAC, KNNK/3/2/4.
63 Martin Westlake, Kinnock: The Authorised Biography (London: Little, Brown, 2001), p. 434.
64 ‘Economic Policy after the Review’, 22 June 1989, CAC, KNNK/6/2/13.
65 ‘Economic Policy after the Review’.
66 First Report of a Labour Party Economic Policy, July 1986, King's College, Cambridge, NK/11/10.
67 Bryan Gould speech in Cambridge, 17 May 1987, CAC, BRAY Acc. 870, Box 10.
68 Kinnock, Making Our Way, p. 111.
69 Kinnock, Making Our Way, p. 111.
70 House of Commons Debates, 11 March 1985, 75, cols 105–6.
71 Lord Eatwell to the author, 8 January 2016.
72 Kaveh Pourvand, Picking Winners: How UK Industrial Policy Ensured the Success of the Aerospace and Automobile Industries (London: Civitas, 2013), p. 33.
73 Lord Eatwell to the author, 8 January 2016.
74 Lord Eatwell to the author, 8 January 2016.
75 House of Commons Debates, 15 May 1985, 79, col. 334.
76 See press cuttings in CAC, KNNK/6/2/1.
77 New York Times, 18 February 1986, www.nytimes.com/1986/02/18/world/after-thatcher-kinnock-doesn-t-spring-to-mind.html?pagewanted=1 (accessed 14 January 2017).
78 Boston Globe, 20 May 1987, p. 5.
79 Toronto Globe and Mail, 12 May 1988, p. 8.
80 See Al From, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
81 ‘Developing a Communication Strategy’, June 1988, CAC, KNNK/6/2/1.
82 Westlake, Kinnock, pp. 425, 427.
83 Glasgow Herald, 20 September 1985, p. 6.
84 Glasgow Herald, 20 March 1989, p. 4.
85 Glasgow Herald, 20 March 1989, p. 4.
86 Radice, Labour's Path to Power, pp. 200–1.
87 The Times, 18 July 1991, p. 27.
88 Economic briefing, 14 January 1991, CAC, KNNK/6/2/15.
89 Via the European Commission's Eurostat service at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat
90 David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1992 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 98.
91 Spectator, 14 December 1991, p. 18.
92 Such as House of Commons Debates, 9 July 1985, 82, col. 1043 and 20 March 1986, 94, col. 445. Prescott as something of a more ‘traditional’ moderniser, admittedly.
93 Radice, Labour's Path to Power, p. 209.
94 Gordon Brown lecture, 17 May 1995, CAC, BRAY 97/097.
95 Bray to Blair, July 1994, CAC, BRAY 97/097.