He would have had no truck whatever with the notion that his party should vote for a referendum it did not support, promise to respect the outcome and then perform a 180 degrees turn when the wrong result emerged from the ballot boxes.In the meantime, it’s distasteful that the memory of the best prime minister the country never had is being invoked, 25 years after his death, in support of a campaign whose own cynicism and dishonesty Smith would have recoiled from.If claiming that two plus two equals five, that black is white and that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is the same as John Smith’s is what Tom Watson must tell himself to get through the day, then fair enough. For a start he risked his fresh leadership in 1993 by demanding that the Party Conference abolish the Trade Union block vote. Having been ahead by 20% in the polls, he was expected to lead the party to victory at the 1997 election. But it was close-run, and he never relinquished his attachment to the constituency system.I have known, in the sense of having lobbied and talked to, five Labour leaders: Kinnock, Smith, Blair, Brown and Miliband. There is a memorial to Mr Smith in the new Scottish parliament building in Edinburgh. Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, is campaigning for a rerun referendum in order to keep Britain in the EU, and so will today claim that Smith would have agreed with him. His immediate solution was to hope that public opinion could ensure permanence. "After two terms of Prime Minister John Smith, Britain would have been embedded much more deeply in the European Union - to the resigned fury of the Conservative-led opposition.Ken Livingstone told me that "unlike Blair, John Smith always used to talk to me". It shows his inner self confidence and commitment.”“We do have an elective dictatorship. By implementing Smith’s far-reaching reform programme while drawing back from integrating these reforms, Blair broke but did not replace the greatest strength of the old order, which was not its flexibility but the loyalty it commanded.With over 10,000 signatures, gathered by mail, many with cheques (the number would later grow to over 50,000), the Charter launched a four-element strategy. Although all shared a fear of a rabid press, the other four were each constantly apprehensive in their own distinct ways; the nature and quality of their anxieties differing according to their ambitions and character. He was not convinced of the need for PR. He was consciously not a ‘old boy’ and did not wish to be seen as part of the Anglo-British establishment (unlike other Scots one could mention). Unless, that is, Farage gets there first. Nor, unlike Gordon Brown, did he allow himself to be put into a position where he needed to discuss the problems of codification and thus the transformation of the constitutional system as a whole, which Smith by contrast welcomed. By May 1994 Labour was more than 20 points ahead of the Conservatives in the opinion polls. By contrast, Smith, while cautious, was self-confident and seemed at ease with his own journey and ambition. This was to pose an immediate crisis when the Plant Commission reported and endorsed the need for Labour to back electoral reform. I played a small part in this process myself, when soon after becoming Labour leader Smith gave a speech hosted by Charter 88 - which I headed at the time. When we lost John Smith, we lost a leader who would have taken Labour and Britain down the path of radical and necessary reform of our constitution and political culture. But there was an alternative, another road that could have been taken.

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