The collapse of the Labour vote in the Ribble Valley by-election and the opinion polls showing a strong Tory lead must have set the alarm bells ringing in the Kinnock camp.
Before the Tory leadership battle the Tories were well behind in the polls. Now there is actually the possibility of a fourth election victory, without Mrs T. How could this happen?
Let's look first at Ribble Valley. Here you had a Tory rural seat which Labour could never win. Obviously there was massive tactical voting to defeat the Tory candidate. This was on the simple basis of protesting against the poll tax. If the poll tax is scrapped then Ribble Valley will be in Tory hands at the next general election. Tactical voting has been massively accelerated in by-clections by opinions polls which give the voters a clear signal of which is the candidate who stands a chance of beating the incumbent. Since the seat is usually held by the Tones or Labour, then this more or less automatically favours the Liberal Democrats - especially in the political situation today.
Sunday's newspaper polls showed very clearly that the Ribbie Valley result was not an indication of cer. tain defeat in a general election for the Tories - far from it. The result was a short term, quite specific protest.
The polls showing a Tory lead of up to 8 percent reveal one thing very clearly. If John Major gets rid of the poll tax he has a good chance of winning the general election.
If the political turnaround since last autuma is dramatic then it is a product of quite dramatic political events. Thatcher has gone and we have had the biggest war since Korea. Major is getting rid of the hated poll tax. His policy on the Gulf got near 100% support from Labour and the Liberals. Labour's two biggest clectoral assets, Thatcher and the tax, have gone. The Tories are succeeding, temporarily, in pushing inflation and interest rates down, which will help Tory-voting home owners • at the expense of unemployment moving towards 3 million again. Now electoral conEdence in the Labour Party, and crucially its alternative policies, will be tested.
It's true that the Tories have big problems. economy is going down the pan. They are still utterly divided on what replaces the poll tax and on Burope, But none of this will necessarily prove decisive. What is clear is that Kinnock's policy of re-centering Labour, embracing the market, NATO, nuclear weapons and the Gulf war, is no guarantee of electoral victory. Most voters don't have a clue what Labour's economic alternative is, and are deeply suspicious of whether Labour will "manage' the economy better than the Tories.
A further problem is the limited resurgence of the Liberal Democrats. The more far-sighted Tories will understand that building the Liberal Democrats up will help to split the anti-Tory vote, and they could win again with as little as 40 per cent of the vote.
Now the possibility of Labour winning the election by default, in a huge vote against Thatcher, is gone, the underlying picture is being revealed. The truth is that attempting to move further and further to the right, narrowing the policy gap with the Tories, and hoping for a default victory, was a gamble vulnerable to the very events that have undermined it.
Labour's alternative political profile is not a question just of what stand it took on the Gulf war, or recent policy issues. It is a question of the whole Kinnock project since 1983. The search for electoral victory by moving every further rightwards was deeply flawed in its very concep tion. It has, together with "new realism" in the unions, gravely undermined the resources for resistance to the Tories and their reactionary offensive - in struggle and ideologically.
The general election will be a test of the relationship of forces crystallised by a decade of anti-Tory struggle, and the many defeats in that struggle. It will test out the decision to betray the miners. It will test out the decision by almost every Labour council to simply accept cuts and the poll tax. It will test out Labour support in the Gulf war.
Of course, the election has not yet taken place. There are still huge reserves of hatred of the Conservatives - with or without Thatcher. A fourth Tory victory is not at all certain. But either way, Kinnockism faces its final test - cither in the form of a totally right wing Labour government or a new Tory victory. In the latter variant, Kinnock will be replaced, most likely by John Smith. In any case, the whole Kinnock project is about to unravel.
Chris Taylor