Aboard the empty bandwagon at this stage of the game. popular chord. ONE THEY SAY an empty pot makes the most noise: nobody could prove that by Neil Kinnock, whose election offensive appears to have ground to a halt even before Despite the windy speechifying, trendy videos and the scrapping of the red flag for modish pastel shades of bland grey and yuppie peach, Kinnock has proved himself the Lawrie MacMenemy of British politics, taking over pledging First Division results, A bove all, Kinnock won the leadership because he was seen by his patrons in the union bureaucracy as the answer to the problem of media presentation, as a real contrast from the donkey-jacketed duffer who carried In the event, few Labour leaders can have so accurately matched Winston Churchill's jibe that 'An empty cab drew up - and out got Clem Attlee'. In but delivering only the threat of relegation. the blame for the 1983 election debacle. anyone noticed it had started.
We hope readers will join us in fighting to carry it The result is clear to all: with an expected June election looming, repeated efforts at push-starting have now left an empty Labour bandwagon in the middle of the road, with nobody keen to climb aboard. While Tory votes stand firm, Kinnock's do-nothing, tongue-tied and apologetic Labour Party is surrend- ering the initiative and electoral support to the Al- A recent issue of Labour Briefing won prominent coverage in the national press when it headlined on Kamikaze Kinnock': but this very title, suggesting rash adventurism is perhaps too generous to the disas- trous lead he and his union sponsors have given to the labour movement. Kinnock is leading the most disas- trous suicide squad of all: one with no sense of direction or class loyalty, which time and again crash- A vicious third term of Thatcher government, with the lingering menace of still more draconian attacks on unions, local government and the decima- price for the labour movement to pay for the incompe- tence of the Labour leadership. And for the hard left and the Marxists, the hardest thing of all is to win support after a defeat by reminding workers 'we told However, somebody has to draw out the political lessons of 'another fine mess', and attempt to piece together policies and a programme for class action to defend the workers' movement. Our magazine makes no apology for committing itself to this political task. tion of remaining public services, would be a heavy lands on its own troops! place of a dynamic, media projection, Kinnock has been pushed into a continual retreat from pillar to post under pressure from the media, apparently lacking the slightest conception of how to fight back. Meanwhile the most adept Labour politicians — especially Calla- ghan, now knighted for services to NATO and the ruling their public interventions, each time successfully pro- One problem for Kinnock is that no amount of glossy media packaging can conceal the fact that behind the hollow facade of razzmatazz there is almost nothing there — even his conference rhetoric and jokes have been jettisoned in the creation of a marketing Another reason why the obsessive focus on media Labours policies fave be ime, the the more g and more bland less newsworthy they appear. More basic is the harsh fact that the media are in the hands of the ruling class - and the ruling class is not keen to make life easy for opportunity not only to witch hunt the 'loony left' but to link the 'extremists' in the public mind with the Kinnock leadership. The more Kinnock engages in the