Leading Article: Still a need for the big idea
By MARY FAGAN
NEIL Kinnock and the party he leads are looking better than they have done at any time since he took office in 1983.
There will be ritual rebellion in Brighton from the Transport and General Workers Union over Labour's belated renunciation of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
But Ron Todd, the union's general secretary, is expected to concede defeat gracefully.
Even if other antinuclear fundamentalists threaten to fight, fight and fight again, Mr Kinnock need have no fear.
The more firmly he tells them and the country that, as Prime Minister, he and not they will rule, the more likely it is that he will eventually reach Downing Street.
On other issues, crucial victories have been won before the Labour Party's annual conference opens.
Relatively few influential activists would now quarrel with the recognition that markets are an effective way of generating wealth and indicating consumer preferences.
Few want the wholesale repeal of industrial relations legislation.
Even the popular belief that the unions exercise too much power over Labour policies is gradually being accepted by a number of union leaders.
Paradoxically, the more moderate of them are insisting on the maintenance of their block votes because the party is still not fully democratic.
They see themselves exercising the restraining, moderating role they played in the 1940s and 1950s.
Once one-person-one-vote is accepted, some have already signalled a willingness to surrender much of their power.
Mr Kinnock hinted at the weekend that direct democracy was likely to become mandatory relatively soon.
To list the opponents of Mr Kinnock's revisionist policies is to invite boredom and a sense of deja vu rather than any great fear.
The electorate has long since rumbled Tony Benn, Eric Heffer, Dennis Skinner, Ken Livingstone and the rest.
The prospect of Arthur Scargill entering Parliament invites mild derision rather than anxiety in the suburbs.
Potential Labour voters are coming to accept that an increasingly confident (but mercifully less cocky) Neil Kinnock has rumbled the fundamentalists too, and is neither impressed nor cowed by them.
In his pre-conference interview this weekend the Labour leader demonstrated a restrained confidence and authority which is new and, if it can be maintained in the heat of battle, likely to prove appealing to the sort of people whose votes he must win.
Even so there remain causes for concern in the Labour camp.
Yesterday, Labour's leader dismissed both electoral reform and pacts.
Yet for Labour to win on its own at the next general election would be a victory on a scale comparable with that achieved by Attlee in 1945.
Moreover, Mr Kinnock brushed aside the suggestion that he needed a big idea or unique selling point to challenge the appeal of Thatcherism.
He went on to say that there was nothing at all from the last decade for which he could give Mrs Thatcher credit.
The latter point was silly, coming from a man who has spent much of the last five years persuading his party that the world had changed since May 1979 and that there was no going back.
The former is debatable.
Mr Kinnock is a relatively recent convert to revisionism.
If he can produce no grand reason for abandoning left-wing Labour attitudes, people will be forgiven if they conclude that the change was cynical and opportunistic and that Mr Kinnock is more interested in gaining office than in doing anything in particular once he has arrived at the top.
This was not the basis on which Attlee reached No. 10 at the end of the war with a mandate to build a welfare state.
Work-out with the trolley freaks
By MILES KINGTON
DO YOU sometimes feel you should take more exercise?
But just don't seem to have the time or even the energy?
Then the answer is to combine a fitness routine with something you're doing already  and that's why we've come up with our great series of supermarket trolley exercises!
Yes, you can actually get all the body work-out you need while you're just wheeling your shopping round your local supermarket.
That lump of metal on wheels can actually be the most useful exercise machine you ever meet  but ONLY if you know how to get the maximum use out of it.
And that's why we asked Professor James Leotard, who researches Body Culture at Milton Keynes University, to devise a series of six simple trolley toning exercises.
Here they are.
1.
When turning a corner into the next aisle of the shop, don't tamely walk round behind the trolley and push it in the new direction.
Make the trolley turn ONLY by using the strength of your arms.
Tones up arms, shoulders and stomach.
2.
Try to push and lift at the same time  go on, try to get the back wheels off the ground as you go along!
Not easy, is it, especially when you've got the mineral water and bags of flour aboard?
But it's a lovely feeling when you finally find you can do it.
Excellent for arms, shoulders, legs, heart and best end.
3.
Normally you wouldn't be seen dead doing a knees bend keeping your back straight, but if you're getting something off the bottom shelf you won't look ridiculous at all.
Here's how it goes.
You say: ' Ah, tinned water chestnuts.
Just what I need. '
You go down, slowly, slowly, don't rush it, pause five seconds, take the tin, then up.
Then you say: ' Ugh!
Preservatives! ' and do the same movements to replace the tin.
This can be repeated at every new shelf.
Wonderful for thighs, stomach, calves, hams and smoked bacon.
4.
Lift yourself off the ground as you go along.
Go on, push yourself up on the handles and let the trolley take you for a ride, just like a child!
Fine for shoulders, arms, kidneys, liver and offal.
You meet lots of new people too.
5.
Here's one you can do when you're waiting in that boring old queue.
Stand up straight.
Hold trolley at arm's length.
Now, without moving your feet from where they are, let the trolley slowly roll away from you until you feel it start to go out of control  then pull it back.
This exercises all the muscles in the body, and in your neighbours' as well! 6.
Finally, just try to wrench your trolley to pieces.
Go on, try to twist and buckle it with your bare hands.
Pull it apart.
Tear bits off it.
Turn it into the sort of jangled pile of metal the Tate Gallery would be glad to make an offer for.
You won't be able to make any impression with your bare hands, of course, unless you're a trained weight lifter, but you 'll feel your body really working!
(A word of caution: watch out for that yoghurt on top.)
After a few weeks of this, I can guarantee you 'll be feeling quite a different person, and unable to wait to get out for your Sainsbury's session, or your Waitrose-lifting!
When you hear the word shopping in future, your pulse will race and your red corpuscles will be off and away before you can say ' This Week's Special Offer '.
Truly, your shopping list will become your freeway to fitness!
From Dr Armand Pastor GP Sir, I have started to get an extraordinary amount of patients with minor and sometimes major physical injuries caused by supermarket trolleys - pulled muscles, dislocated cartilages, broken fingers and limbs, ruptured yoghurt, etc.
My inquiries reveal that most of these are caused by exercise programmes devised by ignorant charlatans feeding off our need for health.
These fads for physical fitness invariably, in my experience, lead to two things: a great deal of unnecessary injury and a lot of profit to the people behind the scheme.
Mark my words, at this very moment someone is trying to cash in on this supermarket trolley fetish with some useless bit of equipment or other.
You just wait and see.
Yours fearfully AN ANNOUNCEMENT You know, your weekly visit to the supermarket is a good start.
But it isn't really enough to have a work-out on the trolley once every seven days, is it?
So we have devised a genuine exercise supermarket-type trolley for you to use in your own home.
Styled in hard-wearing canadium, it has a built-in meter so that you can know at a glance if you're applying enough pressure.
At last, you can go trolley training every day!
Give yourself a treat and go shopping for a new body with the INDEPENDENT TROLLEY TRAINER!
Only 179.99.
(Warning: Not suitable for shopping.)
Leading Article: Morality and the market
By MILES KINGTON
THE Friends of Thatcherism are working themselves into a fine old lather about the interview given by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the magazine Director.
They regard the article as being primarily an attack on the Prime Minister, and one which is improper almost to the point of being constitutional.
They want the Prime Minister to use the Conservative Party conference next week to slap down this turbulent priest.
They are wrong on all counts.
It is the business of the head of the established church to express his worries about the state of the nation and the moral mood of the times.
It would be foolish and unseemly as well as counter-productive for the Prime Minister to enter into an undignified slanging match with him every time he does so.
If Dr Runcie sees self-interest, self-righteousness and an intolerant and uncharitable disregard for the unsuccessful and the unemployed, it is not merely his right but his duty to speak out.
If, further, he feels that the free market policies and values embraced by Mrs Thatcher have done much to create a divided nation, dominated by Pharisees, he should feel free to offer his opinion.
This is not, however, to say that Dr Runcie is correct.
In so far as the interview is a critique of Thatcherism  and that is not as far as might have been supposed from the headlines in yesterday's papers  it is misplaced.
Rulers do not set the moral climate of their nations except, perhaps, at the extremes.
Hitler and Stalin debauched the moral climates of Germany and Russia respectively.
But it would be hard to argue, say, that Greeks are less moral because of the appalling corruption of and greed demonstrated by senior figures in the government and party of the socialist Andreas Papandreou.
Dr Runcie acknowledged that ' wealth creation ' was the necessary precondition for ' doing all the things we ought to do ' but added that there was no automatic connection between wealth creation and a happy society.
Amen to that.
Market economics is about efficiency, not morality.
Government can do much to set the boundaries in which it is possible to create wealth.
It is for others to offer moral guidance to the newly prosperous Pharisees.
The latter need not wait for a change of heart on the part of the Prime Minister, or the election of a new government, before translating guilt about the condition of those less fortunate than themselves into action.
There are numerous worthy charities, many run by the church which Dr Runcie heads, in need of donations of money or skills.
It is possible to love, and to aid, thy neighbour without state intervention.
If people are unwilling to recognise this it represents a failure of church leadership rather than political leadership.
Letter: Full-cost fees for students
From Mr JONATHAN INGLESFIELD
Sir: I refer to Peter Wilby's Viewpoint (29 September).
The proposals for student fees hold especially worrying implications for the training of doctors in the UK.
I am 22, but I will not be able to earn my first salary until I reach 24.
From that time, I will be obliged to pay off an ever-increasing student loan.
It now appears that, in addition to this, I will be expected to part with a further portion of my income as a graduate tax to pay for my education, the last three years of which I am spending in hospitals, not only studying, but assisting on a voluntary basis with essential clinical procedures and tests.
It seems odd that I should be expected to pay for the privilege of assisting in this way, in particular, as I doubt that these changes will alleviate the falling numbers of applicants to medical schools in the UK.
Letter: Full-cost fees for students
From Professor The EARL RUSSELL
Sir: The Vice Chancellors' proposal (29 September) to charge students full-cost fees will doubtless create protests.
But these protests should not be aimed at the Vice Chancellors.
They are undoubtedly right that it has now become clear that the Government will not pay for the expansion it desires at a level which will protect high quality.
Though the powers of Vice Chancellors are considerable, they do not include the power to make two and two make five.
They can not deal with this situation by cutting quality: in a university, quality is the object of the exercise, and a university which sets out to lower quality is no more likely to survive than an army which sets out to lose its battles.
Faced with a persistent excess of expenditure over income, they may cut student numbers or they may increase income.
Since it seems they are not to be permitted to cut student numbers, they are attempting to increase income.
However, to say all other courses are impossible is not to say this course is possible.
The Vice Chancellors are looking for scholarships to meet these fees, and money for those scholarships may come from government, industry, benefactors or private individuals.
If the Government were likely to meet the full cost, the proposal would be unnecessary.
Industry is in no position to undertake a surcharge on its costs, and will probably reply, as it has just done on the question of arts funding, that industrial sponsorship is a supplement to government funding: it is not available as a substitute for it.
A record balance of payments deficit is not the right background for enforced increases in industrial costs.
We lack rich benefactors, and the Private Sector Borrowing Requirement, which last year had reached 200bn for mortgages, and 36.4bn for credit cards and hire purchase suggests that the private purse is no more inexhaustible than the public.
The plan to raise full-cost fees is likely to fail.
The problem will then return to the Government's desk, and I hope it will then accept that the country can have no more universities, and no more university places, than it can afford.
Letter: Policy and politics at the Labour Party Conference
From MR DAVID SOSKIN
Sir: I was interested by your juxtaposition of ' Poll predicts 42-seat majority for Labour ' with ' Tories hold on ' (30 September), the latter referring, of course, to the Conservative victory in Wandsworth, the significance of which appears to have been almost totally ignored by the media.
Electors are always prepared to criticise the Government in answer to pollsters' questions, but when the same individuals arrive at the polling booth they simply can not bring themselves to vote Labour into power.
Letter: Policy and politics at the Labour Party Conference
From MS MOLLY MEACHER
Sir: Despite a significant gap in the Labour Party's education and training proposals, their objective to double the number of 16-18year-olds in full-time education must be welcomed (28 September).
England's full-time staying-on rate stands at 28 per cent according to the latest statistics available.
This compares with 79 per cent in the US, 86 per cent in Sweden, 45 per cent in West Germany and 69 per cent in Japan.
To add the part-time education and training statistics to those figures does not improve our relative position.
Labour hopes to transform the situation by increasing the number of A-levels to five for the brighter youngsters and providing grants for four-year training courses (two years in a Further Education college followed by two with an employer) for the rest.
These reforms will only achieve their objective if accompanied by the implementation of the 1944 Education Act provision for compulsory part- or full-time education or training up to the age of 18.
This clause has never yet been activated.
The sharply reduced number of 16-18-year-olds will inevitably lead employers to bid up the wages of that age group to entice young people away from education and into unskilled or semi-skilled jobs.
Employers must be required to release 16-18-year-olds for education and training for at least two days per week.
Only then will two vitally important and complementary goals be achieved: to improve Britain's general educational and vocational competence, and hence our productive capacity; and to reduce our gross educational inequalities between the elite who receive a narrow education to a very high standard, and the rest.
Letter: Policy and politics at the Labour Party Conference
From MR JOHN PERTWEE
Sir: Labour does not need a commitment to proportional representation in order to scoop most of the centre ground at the next general election.
All it needs is to promise a high-powered investigation, such as a Royal Commission, into the practicalities of an alternative voting system (surely justified by the intense public interest now abounding).
Such a promise would be the only hope of a breakthrough for the disenfranchised voters and would have them flocking to the polls for Mr Kinnock.
His problem will be that Mrs Thatcher might decide to do it first, and then she will garner the votes.
Letter: Policy and politics at the Labour Party Conference
From MR DENIS MacSHANE
Sir: If Labour is to suggest the setting up of a specialist labour court (30 September), then such a momentous change in the industrial relations system deserves more discussion, and needs to be taken out of the hot-house of Labour Party conference politics.
For three reasons such a move should be welcomed.
First, it would bring Britain into line with the best European practice, notably in Germany where local, regional and federal labour courts handle problems in a fair, dispassionate way based on law, precedent and judicial expertise in the labour field.
Second, it would ensure that workers enjoyed positive rights under law and reduce the emphasis of union immunities.
Labour law will always reflect the balance of power in society, and a fully fledged labour court system will not remove class and fundamental employer-employee differences.
But it should be possible to create and enforce enough common rules to prevent the absurd see-sawing of industrial relations legislation we have seen since 1969.
Third, a labour division of the High Court would contribute to the process of constitutional reform in Britain which surely is to be a key political issue in the 1990s.
The ' trade union question ' would cease to haunt the Labour Party and while that might upset some Conservatives it would be good for the country.
Letter: Independence of no-fixed-abode
From The Rev NERISSA JONES
Sir: On Saturday you published an advertisement for the 10 extra pages of news and features that you, The Independent, will carry from 2 October.
' What do independent experts say about our 10 extra pages? ' asks the advertisement.
The supposedly jokey answers are illustrated by photographs of people sleeping outside covered by copies of The Independent: they look like some of the hundreds of visitors who come to St Botolph's Crypt Centre for homeless people every day.
Given the already appalling and growing rate of homelessness and lack of hostel facilities in London, when more people than ever will not only have to endure the freezing nights of the coming winter on the streets, but perhaps permanent homelessness, it was terrible to see the situation being exploited for a joke by your advertisement: ' Just the thing now the evenings are drawing in.
. '; ' The added coverage is exactly what I wanted '.
How much ' independence ' do you suppose a person has who exists on the no-fixed-abode Giro of 34.90 a week?
Letter: EC immigration checks on trains
From The Rev J. GILMORE
Sir: The contents of Sarah Helm's article ' Immigration checks to be made on trains' (25 September) are extremely worrying.
During the recent European Community elections the representatives of EC governments promoted the ideal of a border-free Europe by 1992.
Now, it would appear from this article, that this ideal is shattered and a two-tiered Europe is on the cards.
One for those who travel by aircraft and one for those who travel by train between London and Paris.
The presence of immigration officials and police on board trains is comparable to the scenes of 1930s America where migrant labourers were turned back at state boundaries.
What criteria would police and immigration officials use in their search for ' potential terrorists' on a train that they could not use at a static checkpoint or airport?
Do terrorists or illegal persons travel exclusively by train?
This is a clear example of the extension of the Prevention of Terrorism Act where criteria for stopping, questioning and searching are purely subjective to the official involved.
Will a person's accent, dress or skin colour indicate the potential terrorist or, for that matter, football hooligan or drug pusher?
This is a recipe for fear and anxiety.
It may mean the detention of innocent people and indeed their imprisonment.
Letter: Cardinal sins
From Mr JIMMY DONOGHUE
Sir: The North-east publishers of Viz are nearer the truth than they realise with their soccer strip (29 September).
Cardinal Hume has not only the cross of being a fervent Newcastle United supporter to bear; he is also known to irreverent members of Mayfair's Jesuit Farm Street Church by his initials, George Basil Hume.
Letter: Bruges and the future of a federal Europe
From Mr ALAN HASELHURST MP
Sir: William Cash (letter, 26 September) suggests that democracy is at risk through our continued membership of the European Community.
He even implies that those who sacrificed themselves in the Second World War are in danger of being betrayed.
His distrust of federalism has to be very great to make such absurd claims.
The United Kingdom signed the Treaty of Rome of her own free will.
Those of us who helped constitute the large House of Commons majority in favour of the principle of joining the community did so with our eyes open.
We actively desired an ever closer union of the European peoples, but it was not laid down how and when this was to be achieved.
It was a matter first of embarking on practical ways of increasing harmony and creating a single market.
Mr Cash is convinced he knows where this is all leading.
I am not aware of any preconceived plan.
Proposals for economic and monetary union are just another phase of the journey.
Doubtless, in time, we will consider adjusting the democratic framework to suit new circumstances.
In an interdependent world, the inability of a national state to exercise effective control of its own affairs has long been apparent.
How each generation of parliamentarians in member states will try to guide the community's political institutions will be for them to determine.
I suspect the evolutionary process will be lengthy.
Mr Cash and his Friends of Bruges seem to want to fight a battle against federalism today which may not have to be fought at all.
In any case, what is inherently undemocratic about federalism?
The Americans manage quite well.
The terrors which Mr Cash expresses about our future in the community have a familiar ring about them.
Nationalists in Scotland say much the same thing about being part of the UK.
Those of us who want the Scottish people to stay in the UK can see nothing logically wrong or abhorrent in the UK developing its constitutional relationship with its community partners.
Finally to cite the independence movement in Eastern Europe as the antithesis of what is happening in the community is the ultimate absurdity.
Countries such as the Baltic states hardly signed up with the Soviet Union as free agents.
It is small wonder that they want out.
Once armed with that freedom they might surprise Mr Cash by also seeking membership of the community.
Letter: ' Inexplicable ' libel awards
From Mr ROGER COOMBS
Sir: Marcel Berlins (' Good men and generous'; Law, 29 September) calls the absurdly high awards made by juries in libel actions' inexplicable '.
The most probable reason, considering the fanciful and irresponsible way the tabloid press operates these days, is a wish to punish newspapers for libel in a way that hurts and deters.
This could be done more effectively if the law was changed so that it became the jury's responsibility to assess only the actual damage to the plaintiff and the judge's responsibility to impose an unlimited fine on the defendants according to his view of their culpability.
Letter: Portrait of a nation's values
From Dr BEVERLEY HALSTEAD
Sir: A nation's perception of itself and its values are reflected in the portraits on its banknotes.
Ours currently extol the virtues of Britain's response to the French Revolution (5), remind us of our traditional relationship with Russia (10), the danger implicit in teenage romance (20) and the importance of our architectural heritage (50).
The withdrawal of the pound note with Sir Isaac Newton leaves no place in the nation's pockets for science.
Would it not be appropriate for this situation to be remedied by putting Charles Darwin on a new 100 note to emphasise to the world, in these uncertain times, our tradition of change by evolution and not revolution?
Letter: Recycling waste
From Professor R. A. SMITH
Sir: Your reports today quite rightly praise the efforts being made in Sheffield to extract energy from waste and to recycle paper, glass, plastics and steel cans.
Much as I wanted to read the good news on my walk home from the newspaper shop, I was forced to concentrate on my footing on broken and delapidated pavements, strewn with take-away food rubbish, wrappings of all kinds, and collections of weeds, heaps of dog dirt and drinks cans.
In a few weeks' time, the fallen leaves will have risen from ankle to knee deep.
It is a wonderful thing to spend one's everyday existence paddling in a cesspool of untapped energy.
BOOK REVIEW / Unhappy and glorious: ' Churchill's Black Dog ' -Anthony Storr: Collins, 16 pounds
By MICHAEL CHURCH
ISAAC NEWTON, Franz Kafka and Winston Churchill were, as infants, united in common misfortune: physically puny and starved of parental love, each was condemned to a lifelong wrestle with potentially annihilating depression.
In their achievement as adults  each imposing his order on an external world he made his own  they were united in triumph.
Anthony Storr's project, in this collection of essays, is to use psychoanalytical principles to show how in each case weakness produced strength.
The fullest and most fascinating case study is that of Churchill, whose famous' Black Dog ' depressions are shown to have sprung ineluctably from childhood traumas.
Comparing him to Demosthenes, in whom oratory compensated for a speech impediment, Storr juxtaposes two key scenes: young Winston being pelted with cricket balls and hiding behind a tree, and a slightly older Winston terrifying his friends (and all but killing himself) by jumping 30 ft off a bridge.
Until the day he died Churchill kept a photograph of his nanny by his bed.
His mother had had no time for him, and his father disapproved of him.
As Storr points out, he only felt entitled to love insofar as his deeds merited it: deprived of the total, irrational acceptance which loved children routinely enjoy, he was doomed to an endless pursuit of this ideal state, but never with any real hope of success.
' This can not be accident, it must be design, ' he commented when at the age of 65 his great hour came.
' I was kept for this job. '
Churchill had at moments in the First World War manifested great strategic prescience; his intuition swung into action even more powerfully the second time round.
Rational judgement might have told him that the nation's plight was hopeless, but his was the vision of an avenging prophet.
' It is probable, ' Storr observes, ' that England owed her survival in 1940 to this inner world of make-believe. '
What psychoanalysis calls fantasies of infantile omnipotence thus came into play, together with other attributes of infantility  greed, paranoia, and an inability to follow complex rational arguments.
Churchill demanded that all ideas be submitted to him on a half-sheet of paper; he was frequently insensitive, a bad judge of character, and a sucker for flamboyant charlatans; intensely loyal, he demanded uncritical loyalty in return.
The end of the war meant the end of the blissful congruence between fantasy and reality, and Churchill turned to painting and writing in an effort to regain that happy state.
But as Storr demonstrates with the aid of two stunningly beautiful passages from Churchill's early novel Savrola, the pen was better suited to delineating the bleak impotence he felt at his innermost core.
Franz Kafka perfectly exemplifies the efficacy of art in counteracting emotional wounds, if not in healing them.
He felt powerless in the face of his father, and was cursed with the unshakeable conviction that he was to be punished throughout life for some unspecified crime.
Anthony Storr shows how these depressive fears were magically transmuted in the literary sphere.
Kafka's gift to posterity lay not in any facile adumbration of the Nazi concentration camps, but in his ability to articulate terrors which we all have lurking in the recesses of our minds.
Newton spent more time and energy on alchemical speculations than on the scientific discoveries which galvanised the Western world: Storr reconstructs the neurotic drive which impelled him to heroic intellectual feats.
Like Einstein he distrusted the senses, like many philosophers he was incapable of sustaining close emotional relationships, and within his cloistered concentration miracles took place.
' I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into the full and clear light. '
This chapter makes heartening reading, as does the entire book.
Churchill's Black Dog may be marred by cut-price literary criticism, and its construction may be slapdash, but its armature is a belief that people can, by an act of creative will, save their souls at any stage, that fundamental personal change is possible after 40, 50, even 60.
As our population grows older, this is an idea whose time has come.
What Kinnock must say: Giles Radice on the Labour leader's opportunity to set the political agenda
By GILES RADICE
NEIL KINNOCK'S speech at the Labour Party conference tomorrow will be the most important he has ever made.
For the first time since he became leader, he is in the position to set the political agenda.
As he prepares his text, he might recall Harold Wilson's speech to the 1963 Scarborough conference.
After 12 years in power, the Tories had run out of steam.
Wilson's task was to project his party as an alternative government and associate Labour with the agenda of the 1960s.
He succeeded triumphantly.
His' white heat ' speech not only demonstrated that he was aware of the scientific revolution that was changing Britain but also associated Labour with efficiency, modernisation and planning.
Labour won the 1964 election and was in power for 11 of the next 15 years.
As in 1963, so today there is a strong sense that the tide is turning.
But the Tories still have time to recover, especially if they jettison some of the more unattractive aspects of Thatcherism.
Mr Kinnock's job at conference must be to demonstrate Labour's electability by confirming the party's new revisionism, by reassuring voters on issues where there is still doubt and, above all, by helping set the agenda for the 1990s.
The party has abandoned policies which made it unelectable in the 1980s.
It is no longer the party of traditional nationalisation; it is no longer anti-European; above all, it is no longer unilateralist.
Mr Kinnock must stress the extent to which Labour has really changed.
Defence, which lost Labour so many votes in 1983 and 1987, is especially important.
Here Mr Kinnock should set out clearly why, in the Gorbachev era, negotiated rather than unilateral disarmament is almost always preferable.
On the economy, there is still work to do.
Polls show that, despite impressive performances by John Smith and Gordon Brown, many voters still believe Labour is a party of high taxation and inflation.
But there is strong support for sensible increases in public spending, provided this does not lead to massive hikes in taxation.
The party has to emphasise that, in contrast to the Tories, it believes public spending should rise in line with growth in output, but that it will pursue responsible fiscal policies.
Labour's hand on inflation would be strengthened if its leader were able to announce that it now supported early British entry into the exchange rate mechanism of the European monetary system.
Mr Kinnock will also have to clarify several confusions in policy.
He should repeat his assurance that, while Labour is opposed to the privatisation of water and electricity and wants to see a return to public control, it is not the party's intention to clobber those who buy shares.
Muddle over trades union legislation must also be cleared up.
UK employees, among the least protected in Europe, need more extensive statutory rights.
But that does not mean the repeal of all Conservative legislation, nor that unions should be immune from penalties.
It is essential that the modern Labour Party should not be in hock to the unions.
But perhaps Mr Kinnock's most important task next week is to look forward.
Labour's acceptance of the market strengthens the increasingly powerful case for government intervening selectively.
The classic example of market failure is environmental protection.
Education and training and research and development are other areas where government intervention is badly needed.
The dilapidation of our transport system and the shoddy state of our national services underlines the argument for more public investment.
Labour's change of policy on the European Community puts it in a strong position to argue that economic and industrial decisions are increasingly likely to be made on a European basis and it is essential that Britain plays a more constructive role.
We shall need to develop, for example, a viable policy on economic and monetary union.
At the time when Poland has its first Solidarity prime minister, Hungary is to have free elections, and Britain is fed up with Mrs Thatcher's authoritarian style, Labour should be seen to take democratic issues seriously.
I am disappointed the policy review has adopted such a negative attitude both to a Bill of Rights and electoral reform.
A new agenda, centred on citizens' rights and democratic reform, selective government intervention, environmental protection and a more positive role in Europe would provide the basis for a new progressive majority.
It must be Mr Kinnock's task this week to capture this new agenda for Labour and set the party on the path to power.
Disturbingly quiet on the Western front
By WILLIAM REES-MOGG
THE HISTORIC roots of culture are extremely deep.
I can remember sitting at Professor Hayek's feet in the company of Margaret Thatcher, a fellow disciple.
Yet I do not doubt that Aristotle and St Paul have done more to frame the Prime Minister's mind and therefore the destiny of her Government than any thinkers who have been dead for less than 1,900 years.
The great dead have framed our culture: our culture shapes our political life; therefore the great dead have shaped our political life.
If one wants to explore the possibilities of Europe's political future, one needs therefore to examine the development of European culture.
I have tried to focus such an examination by playing the parlour game of making a list of the 50 Europeans who have most influenced the consciousness of Europe in the last 1,000 years.
Such a proceeding is, of course, arbitrary to the point of being ridiculous.
I have excluded from my list politicians as such  hence the absence of Napoleon  but have allowed in Lenin and Hitler because they largely invented their own ideologies.
I have no doubt excluded towering figures who ought to have been included, and included some less important.
To have found no space for Scott, Kant, Gibbon, Pushkin, Copernicus, Boyle, Pope, Nietzsche and Racine will seem to many to have been an impertinence.
From the lists I made, I came to feel that European culture in the last millennium may have had some 100 real heroes, the mastersingers of Europe, of which I have tried to identify half.
However, at least 10 of my cultural heroes would appear on almost all lists, and perhaps 30 would appear on most.
Nobody could deny the place of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton, Mozart or Voltaire in the firmament of European culture.
I was surprised by two conclusions that came from making such a list.
I had not expected the twentieth century to show such a steep decline both in numbers and in quality, though I was less surprised to see the cultural importance of the nineteenth century.
I was also surprised to see how great the Germanic contribution to European culture had been.
No doubt one could easily design a more Francophone list, but with nine Germans and three Austrians, the German-language contribution was close in number to the 13 English-language and outnumbered the eight French.
In this field there are two common ideas, of which one is true and the other is false.
The true idea is that Italy is the cradle of European civilisation.
Italy, as the centre of the Roman world, conveyed the classical idea to a barbarian Europe; Rome, as the site of papacy, propagated the faith of the Catholic Church.
Down to the end of the fifteenth century, Italians dominate European culture in literature, in science, in scholarship, in painting and in architecture.
The Renaissance is an Italian phenomenon which spread to the rest of Europe.
The false idea is that French culture took over the leading position of Italy.
That was divided between Britain, Germany and France and the other nations in more or less equal proportions.
Britain probably made the greatest contribution in literature and science, Germany certainly in music, while in the late nineteenth century, France dominated the world of painting.
The enlightenment was split between France and Scotland.
The Netherlands provided Erasmus, Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
Judaism produced Marx, Freud and Einstein, none of them Orthodox but all influenced by Jewish culture.
Spain provided two saints, out of a total of five; I was sorry to leave out Thomas More, though he was clearly a less important European influence than Erasmus.
What is horrifying is the decline in our own century.
Again I am suspicious of my own bias of taste.
I am not a modernist, though I presided at the Arts Council with liberal equanimity over the public funding of much modernist art which I did not understand.
Yet in other centuries I was being forced to omit, for sheer lack of space, figures of the highest cultural importance.
There was no room for Haydn or Hume in the eighteenth century, for Verdi or even Dostoevsky in the nineteenth.
Examining the twentieth century was like having to apply a quota to allow the underprivileged into college.
It is also true that the twentieth century list contained more than its fair share of abnormal personalities.
The general impression conveyed by the earlier centuries is one of wisdom, harmony, humanity.
Not perhaps in the cases of Wagner or Rousseau, but in the general run of Europe's cultural heroes.
In the twentieth century only Einstein and Stravinsky have undamaged personalities; the others are in varying degrees diabolical, mad, bad, neurotic, tragic or agonised.
That has not prevented them exercising a great influence on our cultural development.
They are also all dead.
There is no twentieth-century master who belongs to the second half of this century.
Europe experienced in the first half of the twentieth century a simultaneous cultural, spiritual and political breakdown.
The political breakdown was manifested in the two world wars, in the Holocaust, in the severity of the slump, in the doctrines of Nazism and totalitarian communism, both of which were a defilement of human nature.
That breakdown was reflected in the art of the period, which  as in Francis Bacon  partly protested and partly rejoiced in the excremental quality of the age.
Now all is quiet on the Western front.
The European mind has no great spokesman.
There are philosophers, but no great philosopher, composers, but no great composer, poets, but no great poet, painters, but no great painter.
After the storm of the breakdown, Europe is in a period of convalescence, perhaps sedated convalescence.
Yet at least the storm does seem to be over, and the peasants are picking up fallen sticks in the devastated forest.
50 Mastersingers of Europe 13th century: Thomas Aquinas Italy; Francis of Assisi Italy; Dante Alighieri Italy 14th century: Geoffrey Chaucer Britain 15th century: Joan of Arc France; Michelangelo Buonarroti Italy; Christopher Columbus Italy; Johann Gutenberg Germany; Leonardo da Vinci Italy 16th century: Teresa of Avila Spain; Desiderius Erasmus Netherlands; Ignatius Loyola Spain; Martin Luther Germany; Niccolo Machiavelli Italy; Michel de Montaigne France; William Shakespeare Britain 17th century: Francis Bacon Britain; Rene Descartes France; Galileo Galilei Italy; John Locke Britain; Moliere France; Isaac Newton Britain; Rembrandt Van Rijn Netherlands 18th century: Johann Sebastian Bach Germany; Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Germany; Samuel Johnson Britain; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Austria; Jean-Jacques Rousseau Switzerland; Adam Smith Britain; Voltaire France 19th century: Jane Austen Britain; Ludwig Van Beethoven Germany; Paul Cezanne France; Charles Darwin Britain; Charles Dickens Britain; Vincent van Gogh Netherlands; George Gordon, Lord Byron Britain; Georg Hegel Germany; Victor Hugo France; Thomas Robert Malthus Britain; Karl Marx Germany; Leo, Count Tolstoy Russia; Richard Wagner Germany 20th century: Albert Einstein Germany; Sigmund Freud Austria; Adolf Hitler Austria; James Joyce Ireland; Lenin Russia; Pablo Picasso Spain; Igor Stravinsky Russia
Monument to the power of the gun: Andrew Higgins revisits Tiananmen Square for communist China's 40th birthday party
By ANDREW HIGGINS
At a distance  the only vantage allowed anyone except soldiers and carefully vetted civilians  it could almost be the Goddess of Democracy.
Sculpted from white plaster like the students' statue, the new monument has been erected on the spot where the democracy movement's impertinent icon of defiance stood until the People's Liberation Army arrived on 4 June.
For the few considered politically reliable enough to get a closer look, there can be no mistake.
The 25 ft statue marking the 40th anniversary of the People's Republic of China is an altogether different creature from its smashed predecessor.
Far from mimicking the Statue of Liberty, the new statue holds a gun  not just any gun but an AK-47, the weapon used by the army to blast its way into Peking.
Its barrel, pointed by a helmeted soldier, is sticking into the chest of a worker in overalls.
A peasant stands next to them; behind is a bespectacled intellectual.
Tiananmen Square may have been ' handed back to the people ', according to Peking's mayor, Chen Xitong, but, as the statue makes clear, real power comes not from the people but from the gun.
In an unsubtle reminder of the importance of firepower, Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders gathered in Tiananmen last night to celebrate the 40th birthday of ' new China ' with a deafening display of pyrotechnics.
For more than an hour, rockets exploded across the sky  an extravaganza that for many Peking residents recalled not so much the glory of the revolution as the tracer bullets and machine-gun fire of early June.
If the Goddess of Democracy symbolised a vision of China alien to the Communist Party, the new figures are equally alien to the students: the obedience of the intellectual and unflinching solidarity of the ' workers, peasants and soldiers'.
Ironically, neither of these visions is Chinese.
While the students looked to the West, China's hardline leadership has found its inspiration in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union of Stalinist aesthetics - muscular arms, square jaws and stiff poses.
The official blurb explains that the plaster figures' stand as if boldly forging ahead, their eyes fixed on our motherland's beautiful future '.
Perhaps unwittingly, the new statue hints at a deeper truth underpinning the hardline triumph: the worker, the peasant and the intellectual gaze wistfully towards the Forbidden City, the grandest monument to the genius of Chinese civilisation, but the soldier has his eyes fixed in a different direction  down the Avenue of Eternal Peace towards Zhongnanhai, the walled compound where party leaders live and work.
For as Mao decreed, if power grows from the barrel of a gun, it is the party that must control, and if necessary use, that gun.
Four months after the People's Liberation Army stormed central Peking with the loss of hundreds of lives, few can have any doubt about the party's determination to enforce this Maoist maxim.
As many as 100,000 soldiers are still encamped around Peking.
Soldiers stand guard on street corners and roam the city at night.
Occasional gunshots can still be heard, though no one seems to know who fires the guns and if anyone is hit.
The leaders remain haunted by the forces of dissent they ordered the army to crush.
Across China there has been a ritualistic cleansing to erase the symbols of the student movement.
Noticeboards have been scrubbed clean of posters, walls of daubed slogans and minds of memories of what really happened.
Imitating the students' tactics, the party has ordered shops and houses be strung with banners praising the ' great and glorious Communist Party of China '.
And, again like the students, it has issued an official list of permitted slogans, ordering citizens to memorise 40 different chants to mark the 40th anniversary of communist rule.
Not as stirring as the protest movement's shouts of ' long live democracy, down with autocracy ', they include cumbersome chants hailing ' the great achievement of socialism ' and ' warmly hail the victory over the turmoil and counter-revolutionary rebellion '.
Nowhere has the leadership struggled to exorcise the memory of the student- led revolt as in Tiananmen itself, the symbolic heart of the nation where, on 1 October 1949, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People's Republic of China.
The students who occupied the square for three weeks in May and early June have been banished.
So, too, has anyone without the special pass needed to get through military cordons.
The Monument to the People's Heroes, the stone obelisk in the middle of the square where student leaders had their ' command centre ', has been declared a forbidden zone because it is felt to have been contaminated by the students' presence.
In an attempt at gaiety before the national day, fairy lights were strung on trees where political banners and cartoons lampooning the leaders once hung.
There is no doubt now who controls the square.
China's leaders have become so fearful of revolt that Tiananmen is guarded round the clock by uniformed soldiers with guns while the rest of Peking remains firmly under martial law.
Scores of Tiananmen's paving stones have been replaced to remove the evidence of anti-government messages.
Others have been covered with flower pots to hide the traces of the student occupation or scars left by the tracks of tanks and armoured personnel carriers.
Try as the leadership might to erase what happened, nothing can be done to change the one fact on which the future of China turns: the men who ordered the assault on Tiananmen Square will surely die long before the youth they ordered to be killed.
Deng Xiaoping is 85, and while apparently in reasonably good health, will not outlive the instigators of the ' counter-revolutionary rebellion '.
Other veteran revolutionaries on whose longevity the current leadership depends are all in their eighties.
Some, like the hardline godfather Chen Yun, are so infirm they are rarely seen in public.
Others do occasionally venture out but are painful to watch.
At a state banquet on the eve of the national day in the Great Hall of the People, the head tables were cluttered with ageing revolutionaries slumped in their seats.
When Li Peng, the Prime Minister, tried to share a toast with his adoptive mother, the venerable widow of Chou En-lai, he was met with an uncomprehending stare.
In desperation, he finally raised not only his own glass but also hers  a graphic reminder of how fragile the veterans', and by association Mr Li's own, power may turn out to be.
But if they are physically weak, the old guard remain politically strong.
Refighting the battles of their own youth, they have tried to fix China's eyes firmly on the past.
The party may claim to be in the vanguard of history, but its clock seems to have stopped in the 1950s.
Propaganda campaigns, class struggle, the cult of the model worker and even the almost evangelical rhetoric of the cold war are all back with a vengeance.
Television and newspapers no longer praise model entrepreneurs but heroic labourers such as Zhang Fuxin, praised for throwing himself into a pit of polluted mud to retrieve a piece of equipment.
People are told that Mr Zhang was so dedicated that he cut short his honeymoon to return to work, telling his new wife: ' One day without hearing the sound of the drill, my heart is heavy.
One day without wearing work clothes, it's as if I lack something.
I feel ill at ease. '
In deference to ageing stalwarts, the Communist Party's new leader, Jiang Zemin, recently made a pilgrimage to Yenan, the remote village where the Red Army took refuge at the end of the Long March.
The future of China, he pronounced, depends on reviving the ' Yenan spirit ' of hard work and plain living.
So strong is the nostalgia, that Mao, Chou En-lai and other founders of ' new China ' often seem to have returned from the dead.
The front page of the People's Daily and every other major national newspaper last week featured a picture of the new Politburo standing committee meeting with actors from a People's Liberation Army theatre troupe made up to look like the dead founding fathers.
Mao lookalikes also dominate the cinema.
The country's best known Mao impersonator, an actor called Gu Yue, has made a startling comeback in a new 90-minute epic portraying the last months of China's civil war.
In a further nod of respect to the great helmsman, his portrait on the Forbidden City has been given a new look.
Already replaced once in June after being splattered with paint, it was replaced again last week with a new painting featuring a bluer sky.
In Peking at least, the resurrection of past models and heroes has provoked more giggling than respect, spawning a rash of political jokes.
Take for example the peasant who visits the mausoleum housing Mao's corpse in Tiananmen Square.
' Where is Mao?
I want to talk to him, ' he says to the guard at the door.
' You can't talk to him; he's dead, ' replies the guard.
After touring the mausoleum, the peasant returns and again asks where he can find Mao alive.
Again the guard replies that he is dead.
The peasant then walks past the corpse for a second time and emerges to ask the same question.
' I told you, he's been dead for years, ' the guard snaps.
' I know, ' the peasant answers, ' but I just love to hear you say it. '
Another joke is about a student marching down the Avenue of Eternal Peace with a banner saying ' Li Peng is a pig '.
The student is arrested, tried and sentenced to 20 years.
He complains that illegal protests carry a maximum sentence of five years.
' Yes, ' replies the judge.
' Five years for an illegal protest and 15 for revealing state secrets. '
Such is the mood of quiet irreverence and anger that street hawkers have begun selling buttons with the two-finger victory sign that became the symbol of the student movement.
As an ingenious precaution against charges of ' counter-revolutionary ' tendencies, the buttons carry a small legend: ' Victory!  I climbed the Great Wall of China. '
