THE RISE -AND POSSIBILITIES-OF BRITAIN'S SOCIAL DEMOCRATS
Williams, Philip M.
This article continues the discussion of the politics and problems of the British democratic left. For notably different opinions see "England: Dead End of Liberalism?" by Barbara Goodwin,...
...Probably they could not reap it on their own, but some Liberals still suffer, as their leader David Steel put it, from "the smallmindedness of cosy minority party politics...
...other Labour right-wingers convinced themselves that the left could be accommodated and the old coalition kept together, while a few, cherishing hopes of the party leadership for themselves, feared to alienate centrist votes by vigorously attacking the left...
...The SDP leaders all oppose unilateral dis76 armament, but its members need not adhere to their view on that or other matters: no one knows how strong the unilateralist feeling (rapidly growing in Britain) may be among them, but the Liberal Assembly in September passed comfortably a motion opposing the siting of cruise missiles in Britain—implying possible conflict, perhaps between the allied parties, perhaps between the leaders and the members of both...
...Meanwhile they and their allies campaign to undermine the power bases of their party opponents...
...12 "Machines": a quote from the Liberal chief whip at the Liberal Assembly...
...Benn led it with a remarkable eye for such newly attractive issues as participation...
...Mrs...
...Benn might lose ground if he stood again next year and so may seek and earn credit by withdrawing his candidacy...
...instead only seven then did so...
...Dedicated, single-minded, and wellfinanced (with more paid organizers than the party itself), the hard left "Militants" attract much (critical) media attention, and control perhaps as many as 60 local parties (out of 600...
...The Social Democratic party (SDP) was launched in March 1981...
...The party has been able to draw on plenty 75 of volunteers for its by-election forays...
...The SDP's appeal seems only marginally dependent on artificial publicity generated by the media...
...It does not follow that no one knows what the new party stands for...
...There will doubtless be efforts to make the process look more reputable, which will in one way or another affect the factional struggle...
...It refrained for two reasons...
...Why have the old certainties crumbled so suddenly...
...Their combined individual membership has fallen from perhaps 3 million to 1 million while the electorate has grown by 15 million...
...That option would also attract more new members—who might, however, prove inexperienced, heterogeneous, and unreliable...
...At the top, the Labour party has lost 30 former ministers (ialf of them ex-cabinet) in recent years...
...Optimists hoped he might poll 30 to 35 percent of the vote...
...Another major change concerned the election of the party leader, who becomes 'prime minister when Labour wins an electoral majority...
...In any case the split between CLPs and trade unions is far wider, more open and bitter than ever before, and Labour will remain a deeply divided party...
...The most experienced SDP leader, Roy Jenkins—who had apparently ruined his image during four years as president of the EEC commission in Brussels— fought, with Liberal support, an unexpectedly successful campaign...
...The idea had been accepted in principle, first (rashly) by Callaghan and Foot, then deputy leader, and later (narrowly) by the 1980 party conference...
...Early recruitment was rapid, the SDP soon reaching 60,000 adherents—probably a quarter or a third of Labour's true individual membership before the break...
...but policies shifted so frequently that rational planning—in education or local government, private and public-sector industry— became a nightmare...
...It will be put to a party conference in 1982...
...For most union leaders, political choices rank far behind industrial and organizational needs...
...Thatcher also chose all the Conservative nominees from outside the House of Commons...
...Fear of defeat at the next election was supposed to keep both parties moderate and responsive, so as to hold the decisive votes in the center...
...5 The Wembley conference was the immediate occasion for the SDP's break...
...The internal struggle is almost sure to go on with unremitting bitterness on the national level, in union branches and conferences, and in constituency parties and council groups up and down the country...
...But Bennite pressure will continue, however different its form...
...Until Michael Foot beat Denis Healey in November 1980, the choice was made by Labour MPs—whose votes sustain a Labour government, and who through daily association with the candidates can judge their characters as no outsider can...
...Many joined the SDP from other sources: they were stronger among the young than the middleaged or elderly, in the middle class than in the working class, and twice as numerous in the south as in the north...
...In both the big parties the polarizers gradually gained ascendancy, imposing in office measures the other party promptly undid...
...That would permanently change the rules of British politics...
...and though the terms of political discourse are very different in Britain, the reality is not so dissimilar...
...Suddenly it has become as fluid as it was, briefly, 60-odd years ago...
...The Labour party retains immense reserves of hereditary loyalty, affection, and unquestioning allegiance among people who know little, and would think little, of its recent policies...
...The gradual leftward slide of the unions reflects, first, the growth of public-sector and white-collar unions, often run by left-wing activists effective industrially but quite unrepresentative politically and, second, the decline of many traditional manual occupations, where some unions have been radicalized by the struggle to preserve a threatened economic position...
...8 A "MORI" poll (usually the least favorable to the SDP) found that he took 29 percent of the 1979 labour voters and 59 percent of the 1979 nonvoters...
...The leaders of t)oth have been well aware of the stakes...
...for politicians under constant interrogation on television cannot plan in privacy, or freely choose their tactics and timing...
...The swing against the government may be heavier than usual...
...Shirley Williams, who was the most popular in the country, and Roy Jen4kins, who might well be preferred by the SDP MPs...
...the others can be challenged each year until the left wins, when they become sacred writ...
...74 All these possibilities depend on an effective SDP-Liberal alliance...
...In coalition politics, as West German politicians know, parties must first choose and then cherish their prospective partners...
...sense) among the youngergeneration Conservative elite...
...First-past-the-post elections in single-member seats have ensured to one party a virtual monopoly of power, to the other a monopoly of opposition...
...Those party traditionalists, however, were sufficiently alarmed by the imminent split after Wembley to open a fight to reverse those decisions they had not worked to prevent...
...But changes in the party's social composition and the new ascendancy of the right wing have already made this the most openly quarrelsome Conservative government since the early years of the century...
...But the holding device of collective leadership cannot be kept permanently...
...At general elections parties that contest 50 seats are allowed one five-minute broadcast on television, while the established parties have agreed to a formula for allocating time between themselves according to their vote at the last election: in 1979 the Labour government and Conservative opposition had five short brOidcasts each and the Liberals three, simultaneous on all channels...
...This first by-election test bore out the consistent message of the opinion polls, that the new party—even though it would be weaker at a general election —is a major threat to both Labour and Conservatives...
...Beyond the electoral problem is the sociological: will the new party become a catchall of the center or develop as the true heir of the traditional Labour party...
...14 1 Until September, this applied to 22 polls (conducted by several pollsters...
...Trade union procedures are utterly unsuited to political policy-making, and very vulnerable to skillful manipulation, so that Benn's opponents are far from secure...
...unilateral nuclear disarmament— though other defense policies are inconsistent with that...
...Future elections would then be fought under quite different conditions, and future governments would have to be based on coalitions...
...Her fall before the next election is most improbable, since most Conservatives think it already too late...
...The SDP's enthusiastic followers show a similar pattern...
...b) . . . between candidates (of four named parties...
...Benn's appeal was based on distrust of the incumbents so openly that Foot challenged him (in vain) to stand for leader, not for deputy...
...As Britain's economic decline accelerated, the old order was increasingly challenged from both wings...
...The battle was waged in every union conference, dragging the unions even further into the political arena...
...a week more and Jenkins might have won...
...But the internal Labour balance was far shakier, and the left bandwagon was rolling much faster than most people had expected...
...The first option would facilitate a deal with the Liberals but limit the SDP's advantages—for the Liberals have always found it easy to win votes (between general elections at least) from the Tories, but not from Labour...
...The NEC majority has shifted from Benn to Foot and the Tribune left, and no one talks any more of changing the NEC's component parts...
...Conversely, a further big Labour secession might transform the SDP's composition...
...The original four leaders (though not all their colleagues) have for 20 years been strong defenders of the EEC, which has sometimes seemed their main bond...
...If so the SDP might split only the Tory vote, paradoxically ensuring the very result it was founded to avert: a Labour government dominated by the left, based on the support of a still more shrunken minority of the electorate...
...all opinion polls gave it a clear majority in the House of Commons...
...8 Labour had ensured the shortest possible campaign...
...Her cabinet reshuffle in the autumn committed her irrevocably to her course, tying her political survival to the party's electoral fortunes ands°, probably, to the fate of her economic policy...
...but these gaps are narrow, even trivial, compared, to the wide abyss that yawns between the halves of the Conservative party or the boundless and stormy ocean that separates Labour's hostile wings...
...She has so emphasized her determination that she cannot now change without destroying her credibility...
...and they have no concern for electoral consequences...
...Profiles in courage are rarely displayed in today's parliamentary Labour party (PLP...
...Supported by a few left-wingers, many centrists, and the leadership, the "Solidarity" campaign was launched by 150 MPs, mostly from the Labour right—in an attempt to contain the split that could have been averted had the campaign begun a year or two earlier...
...At the time, at least the first and third aims seemed winnable...
...The old party leaders revealed their real fears in April when 15 new peers were created...
...First, the left's new majority on the NEC abandoned in 1973 the 50-year-old ban on "proscribed organizations," which had kept out the official Communist party and its many fronts...
...2 Within each party, agreement on principles and policies is disappearing...
...Holding the initiative, the left kept its opponents busy fighting to stop Benn's steady advance and its own other moves to subordinate local councillors as well as MPs to the tight control of the party activists...
...After nearly two years without by-elections, however, one occurred in July at Warrington in the industrial northwest, a Labour stronghold ranking 551st out of 635 on the SDP's computer...
...The decision to leave the EEC was affirmed overwhelmingly...
...Nor can it be written off, as critics suggest, as just a media creation...
...4 Benn announced his candidature at 3 a. M. because the Tribune group was about to urge him publicly not to stand...
...They are not about to capture the entire Labour party, but for the first time they have found nonrevolutionary allies who will not break with them...
...second, liberals (in the U.S...
...Its members are warned that they can only "build a party which is in no one's pocket by digging into your own...
...The few Labour optimists calculate that the Conservatives cannot now retrieve their popularity and that Labour's voters will not desert...
...with Kerensky-like readiness to work with the enemies of democracy (each side of course hoping to use the other...
...But whether the new party can sustain a permanent organization to survive in local politics—still the foundation of party machines in Britain—is more doubtful...
...Even if it fell back in the campaign, the SDP could probably shatter the two-party system and hold the balance of power in a hung parliament...
...Unions and CLPs have (contrary to legend) rarely taken opposite sides in the past...
...But a new party's share of seats would depend on the distribution of votes between its rivals as well as on its own performance—unless it ran so far ahead as to win an overall majority...
...In choosing Foot by a majority of ten, the MPs hoped to contain the revolt on the left—for which Healey was a prime target—and to ensure for themselves a reasonably quiet life...
...7 At Brighton the delegates (mostly CLP) favored leaving NATO but the vote (reflecting trade union membership) was 3-1 against...
...Healey was unanimously chosen as Foot's deputy to console the right wing and maintain unity in the party...
...Healey won, by under 1 percent...
...and third, disillusioned voters who cast a Tory ballot in 1979—often their first—and have repented of it ever since...
...After another Labour government (with no parliamentary majority) that disappointed many activists, the left pressed 71 hard to vest final control of the manifesto in the NEC, leaving the parliamentarians with nothing but the responsibility for implementing it...
...now the differences look too deep to heal though they may temporarily be covered up...
...and the Liberals, who have expressed for much longer many of the criticisms of British government now being articulated by the SDP, naturally resent newcomers claiming the main share of a harvest they see as rightfully theirs...
...In the unprecedented new situation, Labour and the Conservatives will certainly resist any concession to the SDP, and probably will not recognize the danger of offending the voters if they overexploit tlieir advantage (like many past French gove.rnments...
...Brighton deferred that prospect for a time, but in the longer term it remains open...
...By driving moderates out of the party, they hope to capture its machinery, assuming the unpopularity of the Conservatives will eventually bring them to power...
...Pollsters have found fewer than 60 out of 200 approving either the prime minister or the leader of the opposition in six out of nine months this year...
...while it is common on the European continent, governments there are not dependent every day on their parliamentary majorities...
...Soon after Warrington the SDP scored victories in several local council by-elections in safe Labdur seats— many of them in the depressed north of England where it had been said to be weak...
...Welcoming any adherents to keep up momentum, the SDP recruited a Labour MP and 16 local councillors from a London party with a dubious reputation...
...4 The campaign within the Labour party, though given its bitter tone by the hard left, attracted much wider support from constituency activists disillusioned by the inability of Labour governments to reverse Britain's economic decline, and recognizing no responsibility on the left for that outcome...
...That proposal was defeated at the 1980 conference, but the left has regarded conference decisions as binding only when favorable to it...
...they have altered the terms of internal party debate and given it a newly strident and venomous tone...
...But its stability remains precarious, for while strong at the top and bottom, it has not yet acquired a solid structure...
...This also divided the left seriously for the first time in recent years, with many of the Tribune group (the "old left" MPs) desperately seeking a rival left candidate to oppose Benn...
...in between, each extra percentage point brings a fat increment of seats...
...In September the party steering committee proposed both a president elected by the membership, and a separate parliamentary leader...
...The left wanted the choice transferred to a new "electoral college," representing the trade unions and constituency parties (CLPs) as well as the MPs...
...Williams) wanted the latter picked by the MPs to avoid their having to follow a leader (or prime minister) whom they had not chosen...
...HiN rivals tried to exploit that against him, but at the Liberal Assembly in September the alliance was approved far more overwhelmingly (16-1) than anyone expected...
...7 At the electoral level, party identification in Britain has been quite as strong as it once was in the U.S...
...Internal tensions naturally exist among the SDP leaders and between them and the Liberals...
...two, which had asked a slightly different question and found the three parties close together, switched to the "alliance" question and found the same response as the others...
...A generation ago, the biggest unions defended the parliamentary leaders against the left, but recently many of them have taken its side at conferences and have sent left-wingers to the National Executive Committee (NEC), which runs the organization...
...The BBC's computer, implausibly translating the Warrington result into national terms, gave an SDP-Liberal alliance 501 seats to Labour's 113, with one lone Conservative...
...First, the leaders who sponsored it had held office, had suffered from the manifesto worship that afflicts the Labour party, and had realized that in government it is the response to unexpected and unpredictable challenges that really determines success...
...We have seen that under the present electoral system, above the threshold of 33 percent, tiny increments of extra votes become critical...
...He lost because 40 MPs abstained, mostly "Tribunites" who incurred the customary vilification from his supporters...
...5 Barbara Goodwin makes the same claim for the Bennites in Dissent, Winter 1981...
...A majority (not including Mrs...
...Much effort over the next couple of years will be devoted to detailed work on elaborating the new party's policies...
...perhaps even one day turning the SDP in effect into the old Labour party renamed (with much union support but no formal affiliation), while the Labour rump and the machine survive, mislabeled, as a new party recalling the tiny Independent Labour party of the 1930s—though bigger, more revolutionary, and much less anti-Communist...
...9 The media have been a handicap as well as a help to an operation that is almost unprecedented and highly,flelicate...
...It appeared at once as the most serious challenge to the British party system since Labour began to contend for national office in the 1920s, and as the biggest split in a potential government party since 1886...
...the SDP leaders are natural men and women of government, while—having known nothing but opposition—few Liberals think like Steel in terms of power...
...At the moment of launching, it did attract immense attention...
...and if left-wing pressures continue to grow, the (mainly covert) sympathizers of PR among Labour MPs should recruit many others protecting their own seats...
...but Solidarity's aim of giving MPs a bigger share seems almost forgotten...
...The SDP and the Labour right may then need each other...
...In the past, had that looked likely, the other parties would have shifted rapidly to head off the danger...
...In the past they have rarely conducted their feuds in public (as Labour has always done...
...Michael Foot could have nominated MPs from safe Labour seats, challenging the SDP to fight its first by-elections on bad ground or stand aside, but instead he was careful to propose no sitting MP...
...Ironically the unions, knowing their unpopularity, had no wish for so visible a role...
...Some would have won...
...Had Benn won, some 20 MPs might have joined the SDP...
...Dual leadership would cause obvious tensions if one tried to overshadow the other...
...Governments remained stable, provided they kept their parliamentary majorities (not all did...
...Nearly all have joined the SDP—an unprecedented hemorrhage from a potential governing party in 20th-century Britain...
...While the Liberal alliance is essential, more widespread competition makes it likelier that some Liberals, detesting arguments about power, may sacrifice interests to emotions and upset the deal...
...only once before, in 1968-69, have they ever fallen so low...
...c) . . . contested by an SDP-Liberal alliance...
...With the opinion polls so favorable, no other outcome was conceivable...
...These developments have gone furthest on the left...
...On the decisive ballot Benn took fourfifths of the CLPs (far fewer in Labour seats...
...He gained from tactical voting by Conservatives (whose candidate had no chance and did disastrously) and attracted nearly 30 percent of the Labour vote just where it had been thought most impregnable...
...neither will be able to work easily tomorrow with those they seek to destroy today...
...The sample is probably not random (MPs without local opposition would naturally come up early), and figures ignore the potential impact on MPs obliged to take decisions openly before reselection was assured...
...how can it be reconciled with efforts toward social justice and economic equality...
...Decentralization is a professed SDP objective...
...Dependent more on the electorate's distaste for the extremes than on positive enthusiasm, the alliance leaders may be unable to hold those voters whose former parties set out belatedly to woo them back...
...But since the older cities and industrial areas are losing population, redistribution of seats will at least partly offset the swing and so set Labour a huge task...
...14 Hugo Young, London Sunday Times, August 30, 1981...
...and in resentment of his constitutional campaign a large majority at Brighton revived Labour's old rule against discussing such proposals more than once every three years...
...Second, the SDP's appeal is to novelty, disillusionment with its rivals, and its members' hope of having their say in a movement unencumbered by unions, political machines, or business pressures...
...The gap will widen further if, as some claim, CLPs are now recruiting new members from the far left...
...In August a respected columnist wrote, "Between now and Christmas almost anything could happen .. . if anyone tells you he knows what British politics will look like in four months' or four years' time, he's lying in his teeth...
...Its leaders' general outlook and approach are familiar, and the contrary reproach is more damaging: that it merely proposes to restore policies that have failed in the past...
...The Labour party has won a breathing space but perhaps no more...
...Yet a clear majority for either Conservatives or Labour looks unlikely...
...All MPs must now face a selection conference in each Parliament, which enables local parties to get rid of unsatisfactory members...
...they finally put up John Silkin...
...It is not likely...
...There will be plenty for the party's new policy committees to do...
...The last major problem of the SDP, of which the others are largely a function, concerns its strategic aim in electoral or sociological terms...
...British politicians and journalists are so accustomed now to instant party pronouncements that the SDP has faced much criticism for declining to set out detailed policies in its first few weeks...
...Then the extent of its decline would be critical...
...She also laments that British politics are insufficiently ideological because only private members, not governments, promote legislation on such matters as abortion or gay rights: which, apart from misunderstanding the British system, must seem very odd to liberal Americans observing the consequences of bringing these issues into the electoral arena...
...then, splitting only the Labour vote, the SDP might (as many Labour right-wingers feared) return the Conservatives to power despite their unpopularity...
...those electoral prospects do not improve, the Conservative defectors to the SDP (one MP early on, eight former student leaders in the summer) may well be joined by a few more politicians and droves of voters...
...by Barbara Goodwin, Dissent, Winter 1981, and "The British Labour Party and the Social Democrats," by Michael Rustin, in our Summer 1981 issrie...
...Its prospects depend mainly on how much support Prime Minister Thatcher loses among, first, established Conservative politicians worried for their seats...
...3 Labour MPs have always been pledged to support party policy as laid down in its election manifestos—which were agreed upon, in the past, by the NEC representing the extraparliamentary party and the parliamentary leaders who would have to carry out the policies...
...Money is also a problem, for the SDP cannot rely on the union contribu: tions that keep the Labour party just clear of bankruptcy, or the business donations that the Conservatives attract...
...In the NEC the left has for 30 years been entrenched among the minority of constituencyparty representatives...
...In the London Times, September 9, 1981...
...The electoral system, with its ruthless elimination of third parties (except nationalists), has now become a lifesupport mechanism for two increasingly unpopular and obsolescent political machines...
...That would give them a very strong position from which 78 to bargain for PR...
...At the time the SDP leaders, as Shirley Williams wrote, thought that thanks to their gamble the battle within the Labour party they had been unable to win alone might at last be taken up...
...Both governments and oppositions rested on a shrinking base of popular support...
...6 Having failed to save the party from within, they might stimulate others to do so—like kamikaze pilots, achieving their objective at the cost of their own careers...
...The MORI poll (Note 8) found 70 percent of SDP voters in Warrington giving negative reasons...
...A general election will also show whether the activists who give time and energy to party maintenance and electoral campaigning are really providing an indispensable service and so earning a major say in making party policy...
...but it is not quite unthinkable...
...Alternative plans were debated at a special conference at Wembley in January 1981, and through procedural muddle, tactical skill on the left, and simple accident, the formula favored by Callaghan and Foot was lost and the left's proposal carried: instead of each having 25 percent of the votes the unions were to have 40 and the CLPs 30, with the MPs' share cut from 50 to 30 percent...
...Greater problems arise over policy, which the membership will also decide...
...with an innocent willingness to disavow responsibility for the policies of the cabinets from which he had tenaciously refused to resign—thereby earning the deep distrust of all his former colleagues...
...On the main domestic issue, unemployment, Roy Jenkins made proposals at Warrington that were far more serious and credible than anything on offer from Labour or Conservatives...
...It would make it easier, too, to beat the Conservatives by taking their votes—which would then pull the SDP to the right, making it harder to win Labour voters...
...In suggesting an electoral role for the future membership, the SDP deferred an awkward leadership choice between Mrs...
...They too were soon disappointed, for Tony Benn challenged Healey for the deputy leadership in the new electoral college...
...and with apparent indifference to immediate electoral consequences, provided he can capture Labour's machine...
...B Most polls ask three questions: how would you vote if (a) there were a general election tomorrow...
...For a party with evenly spread support, like both the SDP and the Liberals, will suffer heavily from the present electoral system if it polls below 34 percent of the vote, and will benefit heavily it it exceeds 37-39 percent...
...Even if the new combination fell back (surprisingly) to 25-30 percent of the vote, it should win at least 20-50 MPs, which would probably mean a hung parliament and a good chance of extracting proportional representation...
...some renationalization without compensation...
...More important during an election are the news items, when the broadcasters—at once judges of news values and guardians of a fuzzy "political balance"—will come under vigilant scrutiny from jealous politicians...
...Labour was always a "broad church" embracing disparate elements, but until the later 1960s the moderates were always ascendant though never unchallenged...
...That expectation might prove correct if the Solidarity campaign were to win a complete victory within the Labour party (including the expulsion of the revolutionaries...
...For the first time, instead of the out-party gaining popularity as the inparty lost it, both have declined—in generalelection voting, in dwindling membership, and in respect for their national leaders...
...The "party outside Parliament," which has been challenging the parliamentary leadership, thus represents not the Labour voters, whose broad preferences are usually for the moderates, but the unions (the most unpopular interest group in the country) and the local activists (who probably run them a close second...
...Instead the bolder course has been chosen, with its one overwhelming advantage: an SDP-Liberal alliance that looks like a potential government, not merely a repository for a wasted vote...
...They have won an opportunity to regain lost ground but will very likely throw it away, since their majority (in conference, 73 NEC, and electoral college) depends on people who will be reluctant to fight the hard left...
...the angry Liberal protests against supporting "machine politicians whose machines have broken down" will probably help to keep such undesirable refugees to a minimum.' 2 But the two parties differ in their policy outlook, their traditions, their structures, and their members' temperaments...
...The extent of the consensus was exaggerated, and party leaders who respected it were condemned for economic failures —by successors under whom inflation is higher and unemployment has trebled...
...If they fought separately, the two parties would compete for much the same constituency, and would incur the drawback of looking like a wasted vote instead of a potential government...
...But there has been much resistance and jockeying for position...
...the largest union, the Transport Workers, mounted a crude effort to consult their members, found they were for Healey—and voted for Benn...
...But if the SDP won no substantial accretion of Labour and working-class strength, but did become a haven for unhappy Conservative moderates and Liberal realists, its policies might well prove unattractive to Labour voters, leading to its absorption by the right...
...But trade union votes removed five Bennites from the NEC of 29, and though control of the manifesto was given to the NEC (against Foot's advice) in one close vote, it was snatched back in the next when one union switched...
...and to break the hard left's control there...
...New Statesman, September 18, 1981...
...For years the departing lead72 ers had tried in vain to mobilize resistance to those trends...
...Its charms of novelty have not yet been tarnished by precise commitments that might cause offense.'° While the average voter attends far less to detailed policies than political enthusiasts suppose, the SDP will lose some support when it ceases to be all things to all men, and more at a general election if many voters revert to old allegiances...
...The current Conservative and Labour leaders are strongly opposed, but many Tories would welcome it to ensure against an unchecked Bennite government...
...even 30-odd Liberals and SDP would thus make a hung Parliament extremely probable...
...Its original aims were: to change the Wembley formula by restoring half the votes in leadership elections to the MPs ("50-25-25" instead of "40-30-30...
...Three of the original four leaders would prefer it while the fourth (Roy Jenkins) and David Steel would both be con77 tent with it...
...They were over 75 until 1965, and for five-sixths of the time afterward...
...Unilateral nuclear disarmament was approved (by just under the twothirds majority needed to make it official policy), but withdrawal from NATO was rejected...
...All parties have found that economic plans, which look attractive in advance, may not work in office...
...EDS...
...his 42 percent amazed everyone...
...MPs must for the first time vote publicly—and at the party conference where, in recent years, they have been savagely pilloried by the militant left...
...But that outcome had grown steadily more likely as the left registered its organizational and constitutional gains and won repeated victories on policy: immediate departure from the EEC...
...In traditional Labour fashion, it turned out a muddled draw...
...Americans are familiar with politicians whose primary triumphs lead straight to disaster in the general election, and with sincere advocates of grass-roots democracy who install a new and even less representative elite...
...The text figures show answers to (c) by the biggest sample yet — 7,000 Gallup respondents in February...
...The SDP does much better on (b) than (a) and the alliance does better on (c) than its components together do on (b...
...pending by-election offered an excellent chance to the SDP, but the Liberal candidate, a three-time loser, refused to withdraw—even though Steel risked his own authority by his open sympathy with the SDP's claims there...
...Thatcher's long-standing critics were joined in 1981 by two senior and respected figures hitherto allied with her, Lord Thorneycroft, then party chairman, and Francis Pym, leader of the House of Commons...
...Yet doubts remain...
...but they see the Labour party as their political instrnment, and they can decide, collectively, its main policy options...
...6 Washington Post and International Herald Tribune, March 21 and 22, 1981...
...Conservatives increasingly fear that Mrs...
...Even so, Steel cannot impose his will on local Liberal parties, and the inevitable untidiness and local friction will do the alliance some harm...
...They stay together out of fear of electoral 70 disaster if they split, and in the hope of gaining control over the party organization— assuming their voters will be kept loyal by fear of the other side...
...So in time more defections to the SDP are likely, tilting the balance further left among those who remain...
...its staying power over time has still to be tested...
...It would also have been easier to cooperate after the election with the SDP's other natural allies on the Labour right—ex-colleagues separated only by different tactical assessments of Labour's future, whose cooperation would become essential under PR...
...Almost all opinion polls indicate that an SDPLiberal alliance would beat both the other parties in a general election.' Since May its Gallup poll lead over Labour has averaged 7 percent, over the Conservatives 12.5 percent...
...even public financing of parties (sought by Labour, fought by Tories) would not help the SDP untilthe next election...
...but over the following months most of them, desperate to end the internecine warfare, accepted the new formula rather than continue the dispute...
...See Note 13 for this variable...
...9 Seven ran, five won...
...Should it go all out for a majority at the next election in alliance with the Liberals or concentrate its limited resources on the most likely seats, aiming openly for the balance of power in a hung parliament and the attainment of proportional representation (PR...
...13 Moreover, minor parties from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland will win 20 or 25 seats...
...New Statesman, September 11, 1981...
...yet opinion polls suggest that most SDP voters (not necessarily members) share the general British disillusionment with it...
...In the last ten years this alliance has consolidated its hold . and substantially changed the internal party balance of power...
...No American would expect a party's viability to depend on the details of its platform...
...Since this new style of politics is the first SDP-Liberal priority, it is unfortunate (if understandable) that its implications have not been publicly discussed...
...Nor can access to the media in Britain be bought...
...The party conference at Brighton in October 1981 seemed the last chance for Solidarity to reverse the trend and stop the hemorrhage...
...2 Their combined share of the electorate was 80 percent in 1951, 61 percent in 1979 (only 55 percent in 1974...
...The September proposal requires endorsement of the MPs' choice by a representative council of the membership...
...meanwhile the voting system magnified parliamentary majorities, electoral prudence kept MPs loyal, and governments enjoyed stability for long enough to compile a record on which to be judged...
...But if the Conservatives follow tradition and adjust in time while Labour stubbornly refuses, the Tory defectors might once again return home at the general election...
...But its larger, broader, and softer following is more evenly spread, by age and class and region, than any other British party—a grave handicap under the present electoral system...
...The two-party system has become increasingly unpopular...
...The 23 Social Democratic MPs (all but one of whom were elected as Labour in 1979) have declined to resign and fight by-elections under their new colors...
...The electoralcollege procedure—which one day may be choosing a prime minister—looked as illegitimate as the Democratic convention of 1968...
...As challengers from the revolutionary left, the CP had by then largely been supplanted by various Trotskyist sects and "fellow-trotters," who could now enter the Labour party and were even assisted to take over its youth organization...
...an unexpected third of the MPs (mostly facing reselection), and nearly half the tradeunion block votes...
...Then, with the balance of power in Parliament, the moral authority of a huge underrepresented national vote, and the backing of many Conservative and Labour MPs, proportional representation supporters might well overcome diehard resistance from an unholy (but unstable) Benn-Thatcher alliance...
...3 So far about 130 members have been reselected and only 3 ousted...
...Harold Wilson, whose government of 1964-70 made suspicion of the leadership endemic, used to point with justified pride to his exemplary record of carrying out manifesto commitments...
...If the left continues gradually inching forward within the organization, others will be called on to make disagreeable concessions on policy and in behavior—such as showing party regularity by speaking for the left-wingers who threw out their own parliamentary friends...
...The 1975 referendum on the EEC, which with little campaigning and no canvassing generated a 67 percent turnout, suggests they are less essential than they claim...
...Both hopes were disappointed...
...Two polls put Labour ahead in early October, just after its conference...
...but out of the news two months later, it was still polling competitively with the older parties, and an SDP-Liberal alliance was still well ahead of them...
...The SDP leaders, while still in the Labour party, had tried to outflank the call for "more participation" by extending it to all party members—not simply the activists or the management committees...
...Thatcher is leading their party to electoral disaster...
...but the others would then have faced immense pressure to follow— risking both their own careers and also the new party's credibility while it was still unorganized...
...Commentators often forgot that Labour too has for years had more members in middle-class and southern seats: parties in safe working-class constituencies are often tiny...
...Some came from overconfidence in SDP quarters after the euphoria of the launch and the polls...
...to reconstitute the NEC to represent Labour MPs and local councillors...
...British political life has long been so solidly set that few really imagined it could change...
...II Many local parties sympathize with the Liberals of Croydon, south of London, where another...
...These pressures helped the SDP to recruit precisely where it most needed to do so, among Labour councillors and trade unionists...
...The prospects for the second option depend, similarly, on developments in the Labour party...
...it also enables the left organizers to select key votes, draw up hit lists, and target opponents, like the American New Right—with the same objective to remove a few and intimidate the rest (though by a different method, manipulating caucuses rather than appealing to voters' prejudices...
...Always coalitions, they are both now fraudulent coalitions, composed of politicians who hate their "colleagues" more than their "opponents...
...Different analyses of SDP support may be based on answers to any of the questions, or on the party's membership...
...The prudent strategy would have made a pact with the Liberals easier to arrange, since the SDP would compete with them in fewer seats, but would also make the Liberals the senior partner...
...These assumptions have gradually broken down, leaving us with the same structures, no safeguards, and less acceptable outcomes...
...These documents have become increasingly detailed over the years, and decreasingly relevant to the party's reputation...
...Labour's internal developments will also largely decide the SDP's impact on the British political scene...
Vol. 29 • January 1982 • No. 1
