The cover of Agenda for Change, Labour's first policy statement under John Smith's leadership, is coloured three shades of grey with a stripe of Liberal Democrat orange running through the centre, It could be read as atextbook illustration of a sub-consclous desire for a coalition with the centre.
Between the covers, the politics get even worse. What is almost certainly the biggest shift in nominal decision making power away from the ordinary member in Labour Party history is cloaked beneath the verbiage extending individual participation.
in the past, where left resolutions to Labour's conference -theoretically its supreme policy-making body - have not been crushed by the block vole, the leadership has generally been able to ignore them anyway.
But under the proposals In Agenda for Change, carried at Blackpool last week, socialist post10 Oct. 1992 No. 29 tions won't even make it onto the conference floor.
A National Policy Forum is now to be established - even weaker than the one envisaged when the dea was approved in principle at the 1990 conterence.
Finances
Labour's dire financial state Is wheeled out as lustification for the Forum to have just 100 members Instead of 200. Only 22 will be from constituency parties Its role will be merely consuitalive.
Real control will lie with a steerIng group, the Joint Policy Committee, with around 20 members, 16 of them from the shadow cabinet and national executive. The chair will be Labour's teader.
The JPC will commission policy positions from subsidiary Joint Policy Commissions, given spe cific area briets. Their membership will contain a strong nucieus of members nominated from the NEC and shadow cabinet.
The NPF will initially meet annually rather than quarterly as first proposed, and will be limited to recommending amendments, with no capacity to Initiate policy. This Is 'extended party democracy, Walworth Road style, Elsewhere, the language of Agenda for Change Is not only bland but frequenfly ungrammatical and littered with spelling errors.
On the economy, it is marginally interventionist, repeatedly stress. ing the need for active government against the Tories free markel dogma.
There is even a cautious nod to full employment, the first mention of the Idea in a Labour policy document tor several years. The commitment is however. qualified in the extreme our aspiration is to make full employment a central ab¡ective of economic policy.
On constitutional reform, the PR buck is once again passed to the party's Plant Committee. Existing commitments to Scoltish, Welsh and regional assemblies, a Freedom of Information Act and real equality - regardless of race, sex, disability or sexuality are reinforced, Shadow home secretary Tony Blair's current attempt lo sleal the Tories' law and order clothing is also stressed.
The catch-all section Building a Stronger Community, encompassing areas such as health, education and housing embraces the rationale behind some of the crackpot rightwing think tank schemas that found their way onto the statule books in the eighties. Labour would merely level the playing field for competent local authorities.
The idea of a Commission of Social Justice, floated in Smith's New Paths to Victory leadership campaign manifesto, is endorsed as party policy, Agenda takes no position on Smith's promise that the com mission will open to members of olher parties l its composition is unspecified.
Progress in green issues Is seen as coming through a new Euro-