British Labour After Defeat

...Kinnock's public attacks on the Labour left for its extremism (which he has used to establish his credibility as a strong leader) may have backfired by lending legitimacy to Tory demonology...

...But it is difficult to predict what reaction there may be to a further five years of Thatcherism...

...To regain power on its own in 1992, Labour would still require, after its small 1987 recovery, a larger electoral swing (7.8 percent) than achieved by either major party since 1945...

...For Labour to accept the self-denying ordinance of a proportional electoral system is the necessary precondition of a broad alliance against the right...

...The government has become adept at provoking reactions to its cutbacks that end up discrediting the services they aim to protect...

...Of course, politics can be unpredictable, especially in a period of weakening party loyalties...

...Thatcher, like Reagan, has thrived by attacking the government as if she were an outsider, while holding all its powers in her hands...

...Perhaps change will come first on the other side of the Atlantic...

...In the postelection period the Alliance parties have had a highly publicized and selfdestructive fight, in which the more anti-Thatcher Liberal leader David Steel has defeated the proThatcherite David Owen to force a merger of the Liberals with the SDP...

...In voting, rising incomes for a majority have outweighed sympathy for the unemployed...

...Voters are afraid of Labour in power too...

...What can easily seem a constitutional technicality is here a linchpin of political strategy...

...The arrogance of power may undo the Conservatives...

...But this promising development ran up against the interests of the trade unions, who dominate the Party Conference and provide most of the party's funds...

...These arguments are slowly winning some support...

...The problems facing social democracy are international in scale, and no one seems, as yet, to have very convincing answers...

...Meanwhile, the economy, after a disastrous loss of one-fifth of manufacturing capacity and employment between 1979 and 1981, has been growing at 2-3 percent per annum since 1981...

...Central to such a program is electoral reform...

...The Thatcherite program has combined exposure of institutions to market competition with a forceful assertion of state power against institutions deemed antipathetic to market ideology...

...Taxes under the new Thatcher government are set to become even less progressive, with the substitution of a flat-rate "poll tax" for domestic rates (property taxes) which also gives an incentive to poor citizens to stay off the electoral register...

...A thorny issue will be defense, where the leadership would like to see some shift away from the unpopular unilateralist commitment, a position strongly held in the party...

...In a situation when the government really has become the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, the problem is to join together almost all elements of resistance...

...The election result showed the Labour party increasingly confined to a declining class constituency...

...Despite a 12 percent level of unemployment, those at work remain prosperous, and the Conservative boasts of economic revival (from an illness partly inflicted by themselves) have, in the southern half of the country at least, some credibility...

...By now we realize that power cannot be regained by evoking past achievements...

...Some limited electoral truce between Labour and Liberals might thus be feasible, enough to threaten the Tories' hold on power...

...British government now needs some of the checks and balances to its powers which are elsewhere in written constitutions...

...Unfortunately, tolerance of ambiguity and talent for mediating different oppositional forces are qualities the Labour party (and its whole historical tradition) tends to lack...

...This should include the entrenchment of local government powers, a Freedom of Information Act (whose absence has been highlighted by the Spycatcher fiasco), and Scottish and regional devolution, all of which command support in the various opposition parties...

...As an exercise in the use of state power to restructure political loyalties, the Thatcher government is proving effective...

...Interests based on locality (threatened by the attack on local government), national identity (the Tories were crushed in Scotland), ethnic identification, class, and various kinds of traditionalist and postindustrial resistance to market forces—they all need to be brought together...

...Labour has hardly an M.P...

...This has been unpalatable to old-style supporters of the mixed economy and welfare state, most of all to socialists, and many have urged a more supportive and interventionist government role...

...After what was widely held to be Labour's most effective election campaign in twenty years, Labour gained a share of the vote that was only 3.5 percent larger than in 1983 (31.5 percent compared with 28 percent) and only twenty-one more seats in Parliament, leaving the Conservatives with just over 42 percent of the vote and a huge majority of 101 seats over all other parties...

...WINTER • 1988 • 13...

...Survey data indicated that Labour's support was strongest in sectors of the population in long-term decline--semiskilled and unskilled manual workers, inhabitants of the inner cities (which are losing population in the long run), employees of the public sector, tenants of council housing, inhabitants of the poorer regions of the North, Wales, Scotland, trade union members (though a third of those voted Tory...

...A review of the whole social security system and National Health Service has been announced...

...The Tories are seeking to roll back the rights of social citizenship gained in the postwar period, and have declared an end to the class compromise that brought them about...

...While some, and not only socialists, had hoped that the radical right might have run out of steam after two terms of office, Thatcher, at the Conservative Conference in October, insisted that her program would continue at full blast...

...They have allowed investment to flow overseas and encouraged the expansion of the City via the deregulation of the "Big Bang," and by a huge commercial redevelopment of the former Docklands area east of Tower Bridge...

...It offers the party leadership the prospect of trade union support against constituency leftists, but loses the benefits of a fully democratic and open system...

...Where previous governments had sought to prop up or restructure manufacturing industry, to offset the historic bias of the British economy towards the financial and trading sectors, the Thatcherites have allowed the market to shift resources into the service sector...

...It appealed principally to Labour's working-class constituency...

...It evoked the egalitarian achievements of the postwar welfare state, featuring Neil Kinnock in a brilliant television film as an exemplary representative of a postwar generation of workingclass children whose opportunities were due to the welfare state...

...It was very disappointing that this combination of high-tech presentation (the film was directed by the maker of Chariots of Fire) and the best of Labour traditions had so little eventual impact...

...The campaign represented the best, in many ways, of old Labour traditions...

...Central government's attack on local government continues with a proposal to allow schools, on a vote of parents, to opt out of local government control, and another scheme to impose a "national curriculum" (shorn of supposedly radical elements) on all schools...

...The policy review seems directed mainly towards the recapture of some crucial "lost" constituencies, especially the better-off sections of the working class led astray by "popular capitalism" in the form of house and share ownership...

...Neither the assumptions of social and political pluralism, nor the rethinking they require, will come easily to the Labour party, which even in its efforts to "modernize" remains the most conservative of all the major left-of-center parties of Western Europe...

...A long teachers' strike was such a case...

...The leadership of Neil Kinnock was, surprisingly perhaps, more strengthened by his powerful campaign than damaged by its outcome...

...Whose blood would not run faster," she demanded, "at the prospect of five years of consolidation...

...in the south of England, outside inner London...

...Another means by which Labour has sought to dilute the power of its activist left wing and widen its own appeal has been to change the system of selecting parliamentary candidates to "one member one vote" from the previous caucus-dominated method...

...Businesses as well as workers suffered from the icy blasts of competition, especially in the first years after 1979...

...Some of these "demographic" shifts away from Labour are deliberate ends of Thatcherite strategy...

...Thatcherism in Britain may be in the process of establishing a new mode of modernization...

...A better maxim for party leaders might be never to attack your own side publicly...

...It seems now that this Thatcherite program may be viable in its own terms, as a right-wing resolution of the problems of modernization of British capitalism...

...There would be benefits for the left too in the wider range of voices that a proportional electoral system would allow...

...Although the government still remains circumspect in its dealings with the Health Service, its intention to increase the role of fee-paying and the market in all remaining public services is plain...

...Labour needs not so much to adapt to the language of individualism as to renew and broaden the various social identities that might stand against it...

...The outcome at the recent Conference —constituency electoral colleges in which individual members will hold 60 percent of the votes, and unions the other 40 percent—is a compromise...

...In reality, the new Labour left's record is mixed in the local government field, where 12 DISSENT it has had the most influence...

...New Strategy for Labour Meanwhile, the Labour party has instituted a fundamental "policy review...

...Labour seems also to be adopting the methods of the political marketplace, using poll data to try to retune its programs...

...Thatcherism aims to remake the political landscape in Britain...

...Sarcastically quoting Labour's radical 1974 manifesto, she said of her proposals for "popular capitalism" that they would add up to "an irreversible shift . . . of power . . . in favor of working people and their families...

...Social democracy does not seem to be the only possible pathway...

...The international economy might suffer a serious setback, as many have long predicted, and put an end to a British economic recovery...

...But ideological excesses in some boroughs have been electorally damaging...

...There appear to be several ways in which capitalist democracies can be organized to maintain economic growth and political stability, with different balances of social advantage...

...Much of the new Tory legislation (especially the abolition of domestic rates and the education plans) will be unpopular...

...Labour is going to reassure these voters that it will not seek to take back but rather to extend the individual material benefits secured under Thatcherism...

...The favorable tax climate and conservative ideological mood is no doubt also intended to give Britain a comparative advantage in attracting foreign investment in this most reactionary of business activities, remote as it is from actual relationships WINTER • 1988 • 11 with either workers or consumers...

...But opponents in and out of government have been swept aside...

...If this goes through, it will help the prospects of some tacit Liberal-Labour alliance against Thatcher, to which Owen has hitherto been the main obstacle...

...Some initiatives, such as the Greater London Council's public transport program before the GLC's abolition in 1985, won wide popular support...

...Its middle-class constituency is concentrated in the contracting public sector...

...Or, Labour might succeed in recapturing the substantial vote it has lost, ever since 1979, to the Liberal-Social Democratic Party (SDP) Alliance...

...This is vital to achieving any workable compromise with the center parties, and will also be a crucial symbol of Labour's own acceptance of a pluralist political framework...

...The problems facing the Labour party seem unlikely to be resolved by merely strengthening the leadership and shifting politically to the right...

...Appeals to class interests can only be part of such a program...

...Regarding Britain, my view is that Labour should recognize that it must now operate in a more pluralist environment, in which the most feasible political task is not to think in terms of party hegemony, but instead to negotiate an effective anti-Thatcher coalition...

...They are attacking the main institutional bases of Labour support—municipal housing, trade union strength, and public services...

...It anticipates that these new owners' fear for their investments will make it difficult for Labour to reverse these changes...

...The run-down of manufacturing industry in favor of the financial and service sectors, the indifference to regional decline in the inner cities and in the northern half of the country, and attacks on the public sector may reinforce the political groups that made them possible in the first place...

...The government has embraced a capitalist version of postindustrialism...

...It has been the disastrous division in the opposition vote that has allowed these three Tory victories to occur, with voting percentages smaller than those achieved by previous, more moderate Conservative leaders like Macmillan (who polled 49 percent in 1959), and Heath (who polled 46 percent in 1970...

...Labour will not be credible as an advocate of democratization while it itself seeks to exploit the plenary powers provided by the British state...

...One can hardly foresee, at this point, either how Labour can win alone, or how it will be persuaded, in order to prevent a further defeat, to seek a compromise with parties of the center...

...The precondition of constituting a broad antiThatcher alliance, as Eric Hobsbawm has called it, is a program for the democratic reform of the state...

...These changes seem similar to those attempted by the Democrats since the defeat of Carter, in being largely defensive and adaptive...

...Central to the Kinnock strategy has been the marginalization of the "hard left," widely blamed for Labour's unpopularity...

...While voters say in polls that unemployment is the central issue, their votes suggest other priorities...

...This is a major shift of emphasis, since Labour has usually preferred collective to individual ideas of rights...

...By forcing local authorities to sell off municipal housing to tenants at discounted rates, and by "privatizing" nationalized industries through offers of millions of small share parcels at bargain prices, the government has sought with some success to create a new constituency of property-owners...

...Rather than defining its own version of an imaginary nation (a compassionate, caring one) in competition with Thatcher's triumphalist nationalism, Labour might do better to change its vocabulary more radically, and seek to speak for the many different publics of which "the nation" is now made up...