The next British general election isn’t likely until 1996, and Conservative Prime Minister John Major will probably hold office until then. But Labor is already searching for a winning strategy for the future, and Clinton looks like someone worth copying. In a key address in the fading seaside resort town of Bournemouth two weeks ago, party leader John Smith warned Labor that it must dump longstanding dogma to become electable. Trade union strong-arming, state ownership of industry and redistributive taxation-the left’s longtime sacred cows–suddenly found themselves on the endangered list. Smith’s Bournemouth speech was liberally sprinkled with Clintonisms. Labor, he said, must create a “framework for investment” and “an infrastructure of opportunity.” “We must embrace change as our ally,” he said. Smith used the words “new” and “renew” 25 times in 37 minutes-about as often as Clinton did in his Inaugural Address. Mr. Smith didn’t go to Washington for his lexicon, his aides insist. But there is, they say, a “coincidence of ideas” between the men.
Like America’s Democratic Party, Labor has a long history of internal warfare. So it’s no surprise that the hardleft factions of the party fiercely resist what they see as “Clintonization”–a euphemism, in their view, for cowardly revisionism. The phenomenon, argues Labor M.P. Dennis Skinner, is “a stick to beat the trade-union dog with,” and a cynical attempt, for the sake of electoral gain, to forsake Labor’s roots in socialism and its traditional support base among the poor. Clintonomics, adds the left-tilting journal New Statesman & Society, is equally suspect: merely “watered-down wine in postmonetarist bottles.” And the larger Clinton approach? Labor purists dismiss it as “Keynesianism with the electric chair,” quips one British political insider (Labor opposes the death penalty).
Smith has tried to cool the Clinton debate within his party. He insists that no one advocates transplanting all of the U.S. president’s domestic policy to Britain. The lessons to be learned, Smith says, have more to do with campaign style. He and other party moderates are impressed by the way Clinton ran against “trickle down” economics–the U.S. equivalent of Thatcherism. Several top Clinton consultants, including Stan Greenberg, Paul Begala and Frank Greer, presented their insiders’ view of the campaign in London in January. The Laborites seemed “really quite wistful,” says campaign aide Elaine Kamarck, one of the speakers. “Clinton reinforces the view that Labor can put a gloss on things, pickup some campaigning tips and win again in the old way,” says Patrick Dunleavy, government professor at the London School of Economics. That kind of synergy would not be a first. In the 1960s, JFK’s language and style helped fuel the victorious campaign of Labor’s Harold Wilson.
But that’s hardly the kind of Anglo-American relationship Prime Minister Major wants repeated. After failing to win an audience last December, Major this week becomes the first European leader to sit down with President Clinton. The Washington meeting is designed, at least in part, to heal any rift caused by the help Major’s party gave George Bush in the campaign. Tory aides gave the GOP videos of their ads about taxation and trust-and by some reports also cooperated with the Bush campaign’s efforts to check out rumors that Clinton, while in England as a Rhodes scholar, considered renouncing his U.S. citizenship in order to avoid the draft. Major is eager to show there are no hard feelings. “All that’s been exaggerated,” says one senior Downing Street aide, hopefully.
In fact, the help went both ways. Clinton’s campaign turned to Labor veterans for advice on how to counter GOP attacks. Labor communications coordinator Philip Gould spent four weeks in Little Rock advising the Clinton-Gore campaign. He told them not to try to coast to victory without a message in the final days, as Neil Kinnock had attempted, and to keep responding aggressively to every attack. Then Gould came home to London to help spark the current debate. He coauthored an essay last month urging Labor to learn from the Clinton example and forge an identity which appeals to the majority, not political minorities. Gould conceded, though, “I think it unlikely that we will see John Smith jogging in a Rolling Stones T shirt or playing a saxophone at 2 a.m.” Saxophone or no, Smith’s tune will sound familiar.
