Kinnock comes out

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RACHEL LEVER, a member of the Benn Campaign Committee [writing in a personal capacity] analyses Neil Kinnock's appeal to the Left not to vote for Benn.

NEIL Kinnock takes a page and a half of last week's Tribune to explain his 'complicated' reasons for not voting for Benn - and to give courage to other MPs with a left reputation who are forming a block of abstainers that could give Healey the victory by turning around up to five per cent of the electoral college in his favour.

Among the complicated reasons he gives (after repeating all the rubbish about heckling at demonstrations) is Arthur Scargill's statement at the Scottish Miners' Gala that those who aren't with Benn are helping Healey. Nothing could better prove Scargill's case than Kinnock's present actions.

Other than saying he won't vote for Healey because 'he is on the Right, I am on the Left" , he hasn't a word to say against the smear tactics, the lies, and the blatantly undemocratic practices of the Healey camp - the stitch-ups in the right-dominated unions and the refusal of the platform to allow a vote at several union conferences; incidents like that in one Kinnock constituency, where a proHealey verdict was announced after two officers had counted the results of a postal ballot, and then burned all the ballot papers; and the massive backing that Healey has had from the bosses' press.

Indeed, Kinnock clearly doesn't think a Healey victory would be any great setback - "I do not believe that the accumulated policies of the party should be considered to be defeated or relegated if Denis wins the election"

The rest of the 'complicated reasons' come down to Neil Kinnock's antipathy to the kind of accountability that Benn has come to stand for.

In the main, he says, the PLP can be trusted to carry out Party policies.

MPs, says Kinnock, have perhaps over-reacted to response to the 'implied assumptions of . untrustworthiness". The history of the Labour Party hasn't, he is sure his readers will agree, been a history of betrayals. What we need is a consensus for our policies: 'it has to be done with arguments, for it will not be done simply by constitutional .. machinery or regulated democracy or implied threats of individual doom"

Little wonder that on the NEC this year Kinnock voted to allow shortlists of one even where other candidates had been nominated. Remove the threat of 'individual doom' (reselection) for your MP, argue with him/her until you're blue in the face, and live patiently with the threat of doom over your job and your world!

And how about the simple reasons for Kinnock's stab in the back for the left? Isn't he being tipped as a future "acceptable left" candidate, whose chances won't at all be helped by a Benn victory?

Forget the page and a half of elegant waffle. Kinnock is on the other side.