We cannot know how living another 10 years, being PM and exercising power might have changed John Smith. But we do know some things. We know the values he personified. We know the issues that were central to his political philosophy. We know his attitude to the party he led.
So let us use the 10th anniversary of his death to think about the present with his values, beliefs and attitudes as a guide.
We must begin with Iraq. The question here is, ‘would he have taken us to war?’ (It is worth inverting the question for a moment: would Tony Blair have taken us to war 10 years ago?)
Personally, I would love to write that John Smith would have supported the war in Iraq for the same reasons I did – the removal of Saddam Hussein was the fulfilment of the legal requirements of the United Nations convention on genocide. As a lawyer he might have agreed with the point.
However, he would not have been a lawyer, but a PM, seeing the world through the prism of ultimate responsibility for the defence of his country.
A PM has a worldview in which the intelligence and military benefits of the special relationship perhaps trump the centrality of Europe to everything else we do. Smith was by nature a more consensual politician and more of a team builder. He would also have been older than Blair, a little less seduced by the blandishments of Washington.
Though if he had resisted the allure of Camp David, the emotionalism of the address to Congress and the full-on American ‘we are cousins’ treatment, he would have been the first PM since Clement Attlee to do so.
I think the most we can say with confidence about Smith and Iraq is that he would have moved more slowly and tried even harder than Blair did to bring his European partners and the UN with him. A positive engagement with the European Union was a central element of his legacy to the party. In weighing those decisions he would have brought a different perception of the relative importance of the special relationship with the US as against the essential relationship with Europe.
Smith might also have pulled back when his European partners did and played a role with America as they did with us over the Falklands – do everything short of openly picking sides.
Beyond the issue of the war, the domestic political legacy of John Smith seems powerfully resonant again. Social democracy is back on the agenda of the Labour government.
I suspect direct taxation will be again – though not this side of the election.
The most important challenge that faces the Labour government remains public service delivery. I believe that John Smith would have gone for a direct tax rise, in income tax, not just national insurance. In part, this was a generational difference. Each generation has its political shibboleths and none of them last forever. For Blair’s generation the idea that you cannot win from the centre-left while advocating direct tax increases has held sway since John Smith’s death.
What Smith believed, and showed most clearly in his 1992 shadow budget, was that in the long run people would take sharp doses of overt pain better than slow doses of covert agony. He knew well that for every blazing headline in the Independent read by a couple of hundred thousand, ten million read the Sun. And those Sun readers have found the pace of change in the public services they rely on too slow.
This anniversary comes too late in the political cycle to advocate a change now. But the principle of Smith’s style of politics is what needs to be grasped. Less diluted social democracy makes sense at a time like this.
There are deeper ways in which the political example of John Smith is one that the leadership needs to turn to. It will mean setting a new priority in the coming year of focusing on making peace with the party by renewing trust and conviction in social justice – two key Smith qualities – and asserting an independence of mind and judgement on foreign and defence issues.
This part of his legacy is difficult to articulate because it is about the presence that John Smith had as a person and a politician. It is about intellectual bulk and moral dependability. He was a uniquely trusted public figure when he died. It was a trust based on his approach to problems; an approach that was firmly rooted in the ethos of the party and in the locality of Scotland; a set of ideas and principles that were about shaping the political agenda and not being shaped by it.
The challenge now is to get the core vote out. All talk of further market-driven modernisation needs to be shelved. What the core vote understands is social democracy – John Smith social democracy. Ideas like the Voluntary Finance Initiative – replacing private finance with voluntary sector service provision and professionalising the voluntary or third sector to help replace the state with organisations governed by a public service ethic rather than the profit motive – would have appealed to him greatly.
But it is most importantly the delivery of public services by public servants, paid for by direct taxation, where this is the best way of getting frontline services to the people who need it. Most of all, it is delivered by people who are inspired by the ethics and ethos of public service and not private profit.
I have found no record anywhere of John Smith describing himself as a ‘pretty straight guy’ or a ‘conviction politician’ and yet he was, self-evidently, both. That he would have been able to sustain this underlying strength of self through years of power, we will never know. Gordon Brown, whose memory should be most powerfully moved by this anniversary, is the politician who most clearly resembles Smith in his approach to politics and to the party.
This point about the party is central. Many on the left of the Labour party were opposed to Smith when he was alive. None questioned his legitimacy. In a time of crisis, most especially a crisis of identity, these simple symbols are vital. Smith’s intrinsic Labourism is a badge of unity that is needed now.