Best Labour leaders we never had: Bryan Gould

In 1992, John Smith was elected Labour Party leader with 91% of the tripartite electoral college of MPs, Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs), and affiliates. The result flattered Smith because CLPs’ votes were cast as a bloc: 55% support for Smith at a CLP nominating meeting would equate to 100% of that CLP’s vote for Smith at the conference. Nevertheless, Peter Jenkins wrote that Smith could have been elected leader under any electoral system “with the possible exception of the one to select the Dalai Lama, in which Tibetan monks wander the hills searching for a child to be their priestly king”.

Perhaps if this alternative system had been used, then a better candidate would have been chosen. Smith’s only opponent in 1992 was Bryan Gould, a New Zealander who arrived in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship 30 years earlier and had distinguished himself as an Oxford law academic, television journalist, MP for Southampton Test (1974-79) and for Dagenham (1983-94), and member of the Labour Shadow Cabinet.

Gould possessed several important virtues. He was intelligent, had strong principles, and came across as reasonable and relaxed in television interviews. In 1987, he was appointed by Neil Kinnock to co-ordinate Labour’s campaign and, although the result was disappointing, Gould was credited with a seamless operation that contrasted favourably to the chaos of 1983.

Neil Kinnock was poised to make Gould his Shadow Chancellor after the 1987 election, but the move was blocked by the incumbent Roy Hattersley who manoeuvred instead for John Smith. Gould’s appointment was blocked for two reasons. First, he was on the (soft) left of the party. Second, and not unrelatedly, he was a Eurosceptic, whereas Hattersley and Smith were Europhiles.

Gould and Smith represented fundamentally different political outlooks. Smith was a Labour right-winger who had been one of the rebels in 1972 to vote for joining the Common Market, in spite of a three-line Labour whip to oppose. Smith was Labour’s first truly committed pro-EU leader. Economically, Smith was not strongly ideological. He adopted a ‘safety first’ approach and saw signing up to Europe as Labour’s main way of establishing economic credibility. Unlike Gould, the affable Smith socialised with colleagues and was personally liked, especially among the large Scottish contingent. He was, as one biography put it, the ‘life and soul of the party’.

The more professorial Gould was a Keynesian who felt Labour had made a terrible mistake when Jim Callaghan declared the philosophy dead at the 1976 Labour conference. Gould considered Denis Healey “a great disappointment as Chancellor” and “among the most craven”. He was critical of Thatcherism, disgusted by her view that mass unemployment was ever an acceptable ‘price worth paying’. As Labour moved to the right, Gould became more distressed. After Tony Blair was elected leader, Gould wrote bitterly, ‘Today’s Labour Party no longer promises a different Britain, merely a Britain which will uncomplaining accept its declining fortunes’.

Unsurprisingly, given his legal background, the core of Gould’s economic solution was based in a legal analysis. Gould believed deeply in the power of the British state to seize control of the economy and reshape it to improve the lives of ordinary citizens. Equally, he believed that the nation-state was a recognisable unit of democratic accountability and self-governance. He rejected the “invidious”, declinist message that Britain was no longer viable on its own. He couldn’t understand why Britain “was being told by its leaders that in effect we were all washed up and had nowhere to go”.

Worse, Gould couldn’t understand why MPs had so willingly signed up to EU constitutional reforms – first membership in 1972, then the Single European Act in 1986, then the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1990, and finally Maastricht in 1992 – which entailed the increasing surrender of national democratic control over vital instruments of economic policy including trade, industrial strategy, regional policy, state aid, nationalisation, the labour market, and currency management. “I was appalled”, he wrote, “that people who had put themselves forward [to be MPs] could so casually give away to an outside unelected agency such substantial powers of self-government on a permanent basis”.

In the context of the 1990s, however, Gould was swimming against the tide. The decade was liberalism’s shining moment – the end of history. Globalisation could not be stopped any more than, as Tony Blair would later say, autumn could be prevented from following summer. The decision to elect Smith must be understood in the context of this grotesque defeatism.

The irony is that if Gould had been elected in 1992, Labour would have been in prime position to eviscerate the Tories’ economic programme, even more effectively than Smith could have. Gould had consistently regarded any scheme of European monetary union as ‘economic lunacy’ to all except Germany. 

In contrast, Smith and his Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown had been cheerleaders for Britain joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism, pushing Kinnock into this position even though he personally had his doubts. When Black Wednesday and the economic fallout came, Labour was in fact just as culpable as the Conservatives, having supported ERM too. Labour was “saved” from blame because the party was in opposition. Gould would have been able, very credibly, to mount a total dismantling of the Conservative economic position because he had opposed it all along.

After his 1992 defeat, Kinnock warned Gould not to challenge Smith. “Smithy has got it all sewn up… Better to let him have it”, Kinnock privately advised Gould, adding (prophetically), “He won’t last the course. It’s important that you’re there to pick up the pieces”.

Things might have been different if Gould had taken Kinnock’s advice and focused his energies on a run for Deputy Leader. He unwisely stood for both positions simultaneously, falling between two stools. Had Gould been elected deputy in 1992, when Smith died of a heart attack in May 1994, Gould would have become Acting Labour Leader and in a prime position to stand for leader. As it happened, just a few weeks earlier Gould had hastily concluded that his political career was over and that he would be moving back to New Zealand. He relinquished his seat in Parliament just five days after Smith’s death.

The historian Eric Shaw speculates that Gould was “the only person who could have beaten Blair” in the 1994 leadership contest. A bold counterfactual, but if correct, then Bryan Gould surely would have defeated John Major. In doing so, Gould would have demonstrated the viability of a socialist economic agenda for a twenty-first century world, while also being seen as someone who believed in British democracy and the British people. Gould’s agenda would not have been ‘New Labour’ but a patriotic, activist state in the mould of great Labour leaders Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson.