Two words came to mind when David Triesman was appointed to the general secretaryship of the Labour Party last July: ‘poison’ and ‘chalice’. Labour may have just won an historic second term with another landslide majority, but the challenges facing the new incumbent – a yawning gap in the finances, the prospect of finding a new party headquarters and the grim reality of job losses among party staff – were somewhat daunting.
It says something about Triesman’s relentlessly optimistic outlook, however, that he’s keen not simply to dismiss this idea, but to turn the very notion on its head. ‘It’s always more comfortable to try and make change when you’ve got lots of money, completely stable staffing and nobody needs to move anywhere,’ he argues. ‘In my experience, that’s when the least change happens. There’s a kind of a paradox. I don’t celebrate the fact that we’ve got very little money and I hate the fact that we’ve lost some colleagues on the staff. But it does focus everybody’s minds on what we have to do to get things straight.’
He is also keen to present the results of his first six months in the job. ‘The business of the Labour Party,’ he suggests, ‘is to sustain a Labour government and to build the policies for future Labour government. It’s difficult to do that if you have to look over your shoulder the whole time to make sure the fundamentals of running the party are ok.’ Under Triesman’s leadership, Labour has developed a ‘sensible business plan’, key to which is purchasing its own head office in London, so that the party is not subject to the vagaries of rental in central London. Internally, he’s shaken-up headquarters: reorganising very rapidly on functional grounds and putting in place some of the ‘control and compliance mechanisms which would be familiar in a company but which had not really been there in the Labour Party’.
But the challenges facing Triesman on becoming general secretary were not simply financial and structural. The fear, present before the 1997 general election, that the kind of rift between party and government which sunk the Callaghan administration, could occur again when Tony Blair reached Downing Street, was a constant feature of the first term. And, as Triesman, recognises, the actions taken to prevent – largely successfully – this chasm opening up produced both negative and positive results. ‘We were successful [in avoiding a repeat of the Callaghan scenario] because everybody wanted there to be a good, solid foundation for a second term. For those reasons, a number of the debates got shelved, some of the disagreements which have characterised party life in the past were postponed.’
During Labour’s first term, Triesman argues, it was the government, rather than the party, which took the lead role. He believes that this had ‘some very dramatic and beneficial consequences’ – but was not without cost. On the one hand, he suggests that ‘had the party had its own way entirely, perhaps Gordon Brown’s programme of financial prudence would not have happened.’ The general secretary believes that the party would probably have pushed for a spending programme somewhat different from that chosen by the Chancellor. However, that could have led to another period of ‘boom and bust’ rather than real stability which Triesman thinks allowed the government to put in place the ‘platform for delivery’ which was, in turn, the principal reason for the voters’ willingness to hand it a second term.
It is obvious that, six months into the job, Triesman has a rather different vision for the relationship between party and government in the second term. ‘Because we have been given that degree of voter confidence by the electorate, we are in a much, much stronger position to say: “What are the big problems, what are the options? Let’s have a really grown-up debate about those options and lets choose the best of them to put in our future programme.” That means that the debate is on again and that, in this parliament, everybody will have their chance to engage in it.’
Triesman believes that it is this promise that stands the best chance of stemming the party’s recently publicised big fall in membership. While arguing that some of that fall is due to ‘administrative tidying-up’ – the party is no longer counting those who have ceased to pay subscriptions – the general secretary clearly recognises deeper causes rooted in Labour’s policy-making process. He believes that if people feel they do not have the chance to contribute to that or, as in Labour’s first term with the policy forums, they ‘haven’t the smallest idea what happened to their contribution’, they will probably say: ‘This is not worth doing and there are other things in life that are more enjoyable.’ To counter this, the general secretary wishes to make clear his commitment to ‘the biggest live debate’ in the next cycle of Partnership in Power.
New problems have arisen. The general secretary has had to respond to the somewhat unflattering picture presented by the Fawcett Society’s research into the difficulties facing women seeking selection. He’s also had to tackle the fallout from the ‘garbagegate’ allegations and smooth relations with trade unions concerned about the government’s plans to reform the public services.
Triesman declares himself ‘disappointed’ with the findings of the Fawcett Society report which detailed the uphill struggle faced by women seeking Labour nominations in safe or winnable seats at the last election. He found some of the experiences recounted ‘distasteful or worse’. However, he believes that the party is addressing the problem with targets set for the proportion of women fighting winnable seats at the next general election, part of which relies on having the new legislation allowing parties to use all-women shortlists if they choose. Labour is also putting into place provisions for mentoring and training. There will be ‘an intensive programme which will be monitored in terms of explicit targets’.
On donations to the party, he refers to the ‘generous donors’ he has met since becoming general secretary who have ‘not put anything to me I would consider improper’. He says: ‘I think that people who give money to political parties, generally speaking, make it possible for democratic parties to do the work that they have to do to sustain a democratic society. Most of their gifts are made in very much the same light as the money they give to charities. I think far from being sleazy, it is arguable that it should have the same tax breaks associated with it as charitable giving.’
However, Triesman is concerned about the consequences of what he clearly views as a media witch hunt on party funding. ‘At the end of this process, what we will have, I fear, is a pincer movement. People will attack unions for giving us money, because they will say we are in the pockets of the unions,’ he argues. At the same time, other donors ‘however squeaky clean they are as benefactors’, believes Triesman, will find themselves, ‘subject to this kind of press scrutiny which makes their own lives, their families’ lives, their businesses very difficult to conduct.’ The result of this, he argues, could be the introduction of state funding for political parties. As things get ‘harder and harder’ for donors and if British voters wish to continue living in a democracy with political parties presenting competing visions of the future, then the state is ‘probably’ going to have to ‘fill the gap from which others have been chased’, even if this is ‘not for all of the expenditure’.
Indeed, he believes that the media is adding to the widespread cynicism about politics and politicians which is fuelling low turnouts in particular and disengagement in general. ‘I know that controversy is much better broadcasting, much better newspaper coverage than anything else if you want people to tune in or buy your paper, but I am now hardpushed to recall an instance where the Today programme, to choose an example, has dealt with a politician of any party – this is not a Labour Party criticism, I’d feel it as strongly if I were in any other party – as though they were not a consummate liar who was trying to line their own pockets.’
Triesman believes that his very appointment, having formerly been head of the Association of University Teachers, indicates that there is no hidden agenda among the party leadership to lessen the trade union link. He understands, too, why the unions are concerned about some of the government’s plans. ‘What the staff of the public sector do is in a very rapidly changing environment,’ he argues. ‘Change is uncomfortable, it shakes loose your assurance about all sorts of things and it does so particularly if you feel that you’re losing whatever fragile sense of control you had over your own work.’ But he wants the unions to accept the government’s offer to be ‘partners in designing that reform’.
Tony Blair, he says, never described the unions as ‘wreckers’, saying that the Prime Minister used that term simply to describe those who wanted to move ‘back from public service into more private consumption’ in education and the NHS. However, Triesman is clearly puzzled as to the logic of those unions which are reducing their funding to the Labour Party in protest at the government’s reform agenda. ‘All I see in that is an attempt to reduce the capacity of the party to take that leading role in progressive ideas’. And increasing the capacity of the party to do just that is the task David Triesman took on when he grasped that poison chalice.