BRIAN DEER:
HANG 'EM HIGH Page
1
The
Sunday Times Magazine (London) January 25 1998
It
is high noon for old Labour. Tony Blair has sent a
posse to drive out its die-hard socialists, and this
week the fate of leading party members is to be
decided. But is new Labour just looking for a
lynching?
INVESTIGATION
by BRIAN DEER.
A year ago
next week, Bob Gould, who was then leader of the
Glasgow City Council, gathered up his agenda and
minutes, kicked back his chair and stormed out of a
heated meeting of the local authority's Labour group.
He was 61 years old, with a shock of white hair. His
normal manner was subdued and easygoing. He possessed
a style polished over 26 years as a Scottish
political fixer. But as he slammed the door of the
committee room behind him, he momentarily lost his
cool. "I resign," he blazed to friends in
hot pursuit. "I'm not taking any more of this
crap."
It
was the kind of emotional flare-up you might easily
witness in any town hall in Britain. Gould's ruling
caucus of Labour councillors had been debating an
£80m package of spending cuts, and his own proposals
had just been thrown out by 64 votes to 3. After
retiring to his office, on the second floor of
Glasgow's magnificent City Chambers building, he
recovered his demeanour and announced to reporters
that he hadn't quit after all. And the following day
he explained more calmly that he had merely been
feeling frustrated. To win his colleagues' support,
he added offhandedly, it helped to promise them
foreign trips.
Bang,
bang. The ricochet resounded, to the delight of
opposition parties. In the fraught run-up to the May
general election, the casual hint of bribery in the
region was a bloodying bullet in Labour's foot. On
February 5, under the headline "Give us a trip
and we'll vote for you," the Evening Times,
Glasgow, led a frenzied media alarm over the party's
ethics with a devastating quote from Gould.
"Surely someone wouldn't back you simply because
you agreed to send them on a trip for a couple of
days," he said. "But that's what we're
faced with."
On
its own, the outrage that followed this assertion
might quickly have run its course. The Labour Party
has controlled Glasgow almost uninterrupted since
1933, and the city's people have long got used to
strange stories about local politicians. Much as
boxing was once a route out of poverty in London's
East End, in the west of Scotland politics has
commonly been a road to a better way of life than
mere work. When it later came out, for instance, that
the chairman of the parks and recreation committee
had travelled to Hong Kong at their expense, and that
the housing chairman had spent ten days in Istanbul,
nobody was in the least bit fazed.
But
Gould's "votes-for-junkets" revelation
followed two other Labour scandals on Clydeside, and
was about to be joined by two more. By the end of the
summer, party managers were dealing with an
astonishing accumulation of allegations in and around
Glasgow, including religious sectarianism, nepotism,
links to drug dealing and organised crime,
ballot-rigging, bribing a rival parliamentary
candidate, and whispering campaigns that preceded the
suicide of the MP for Paisley South. Never in recent
history have so many claims of "sleaze"
stacked up in one geographic location.
At
first sight they seemed like a potential
embarrassment to the Labour Party's image as a whole.
After John Major's Conservative government left
office dogged by allegations of "sleaze",
Blair's administration has been struggling to appear
as being above the fray of impropriety. But as the
months have passed, some observers have wondered
whether the scandals that Gould flagged might not be
viewed in Downing Street as an opportunity to
accomplish other goals. If anywhere could be
described as the wild frontier of "old
Labour" socialism, it is here towards the
western end of Scotland's urbanised central belt. And
just as Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader,
stamped his authority on the party in the 1980s by
confronting Militant Tendency socialists in
Liverpool, so they say that Blair may feel that a
showdown on Clydeside could help his longterm
project.
*****
The
scandal which set the template for the furore sparked
by Gould occurred in Monklands District Council, a
now-abolished authority, on Glasgow's eastern fringe.
In June 1994, a parliamentary by-election caused by
the death of the Labour leader, John Smith, became
embroiled in claims that the mostly-Catholic council
leaders favoured spending in areas where their
religion predominated and shunned those which were
largely Protestant. An independent inquiry, one year
later, also found that the local authority employed
almost 70 relatives of councillors.
Meanwhile,
by Glasgow airport, to the city's west, another bomb
went off. In November 1995, the party's national
executive in London stepped in to block the
deselection of Irene Adams, aged 50, the MP for
Paisley North, after she had alleged that her local
constituency organisation had been infiltrated by
drug dealers and gangsters. She claimed that a
community body on a housing estate, involving
councillors, was a "front" for corruption,
and that scores of bogus membership applications had
been submitted by her opponents.
Both
the Monklands and Paisley rows were simmering
unresolved when Gould made his votes-for-trips claim.
And then - even as party officials probed the Glasgow
leader's allegations - two more scandals
burst into the open, involving Clydeside members of
parliament. First, the general election poll in the
Govan constituency, on the river's south bank, was
allegedly rigged with non-existent "ghost
electors", with the victorious Labour nominee,
cash-and-carry millionaire Mohammed Sarwar, 46,
admitting handing £5,000 (which he said was a loan)
to a rival Asian candidate. Then in June, after the
MP for Paisley South, Gordon McMaster, killed himself
in his garage, the neighbouring member, West
Renfrewshire's Tommy Graham, 53, was accused of
running a "smear campaign" that drove his
Commons colleague to his death.
No
surprise: Labour's high command has been swift and
decisive in response. Under the supervision of Donald
Dewar, now Scottish Secretary and expected to become
a devolved Scotland's first minister next year, the
reaction from London was heavy. In Monklands, the
entire ruling group of 15 councillors was suspended
and barred for two years from holding party office.
In Paisley, constituency bodies were shut down, two
councillors linked with the community body suspended
and numerous activists had their membership renewals
"deferred". Finally, last summer, the
parliamentary whip was withdrawn from Sarwar and
Graham.
In
the run up to the general election on May 1 and the
devolution poll on September 11, this
take-no-prisoners show of strength from London was at
first interpreted as straightforward
damage-limitation. With so many bizarre goings-on in
the same place at the same time, there was a risk of
a public perception emerging that Tony Blair's Labour
was no freer from sleaze than John Major's
Conservatives were.
