Labour rebuffs Kinnock on policy revision

Press, 8 October 1988, Page 11

Labour rebuffs Kinnock on policy revision

NZPA-Reuter

Blackpool

Britain’s Opposition Labour Party has put a brake on Neii Kinnock’s plans to revise socialist doctrine and again pledged nuclear disarmament with no strings attached.

Delegates in a series of resolutions defied the leadership on Thursday, the second last day of Labour’s week-long annual conference, and rejected a bid to add votecatching flexibility to the party’s unilateralist defence stand. The party backed existing policy to scrap Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent as a matter of priority on gaining office. It was the eighth Labour conference in succession that the 2000 delegates, representing a potential six million Labour voters, had supported unconditional nuclear disarmament. The result was a fierce rebuff to the leader, Mr Kinnock, who is trying to give Labour greater electoral appeal through a modernising policy review which would include bilateral and multilateral disarmament options.

conference will be dissatisfied with the eventual package we bring out.”

Mr Kinnock said the votes, carried by about a five per cent margin of 335,000 votes, were not conclusive and declared: “The review continues.” Others, however, were critical. The veteran Leftwinger, Tony Benn, routed in a challenge to Mr Kinnock’s leadership on Sunday, said, “Any leader so out of touch with his party shouldn’t be leader.” The result ties Mr Kinnock’s hands not just in defence but in other areas such as State ownership of industry, where the party’s powerful trade union paymasters have warned that departure from historic socialist ideals will not be tolerated.

ised. Mr Kinnock’s aides quickly sought to limit the damage of the setback, saying the three successive votes against the leadership on the future of British nuclear weapons — currently Polaris missiles to be updated by Trident in the 1990 s — make little difference to the policy review.

The review of the party’s old-style socialist ideas, launched last year after a third general election loss to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, will not be completed until next year’s conference. Defence is the last of seven areas being scrutin-

Many influential Labour figures, including Mr Kinnock’s wife, Glenys, are lifelong members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Polls taken after the 1983 and 1987 election defeats showed Labour to have been hampered by an image that it was divided internally, dominated by the unions and weak on defence through its commitment to “ban the bomb.”

"We have to work these things out in the coming year,” Labour’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, told reporters. "The results contribute to the review, but I don’t think for a minute next year’s