Why labor split:

...For example, in the early 1960s a famous resolution was passed which committed the party to unilateral disarmament for Britain...

...One can divide the significant elements of the Labor party organization into three groups...

...This imbalance in the media has tended to distort the situation in the Labor party in the public mind to a considerable extent...

...It is hard to answer that question with any confidence...

...At present, if a Member of Parliament is chosen by his constituency party to stand for parliament, and if he is elected, he will remain that constituency's choice more or less indefinitely unless he misbehaves himself or fails to get elected the next time round...

...Many of the union leaders are currently working to have a smaller share of the vote for the leadership than they currently have as a result of the recent conference decision...

...These are local bodies of active party members in each of the parliamentary constituencies which elect M.P.s throughout the country...

...Possibly the likeliest result of any significant successes by the new center party will be to split the Labor vote and thus to throw away the chance of getting rid of a Tory government that is at present profoundly unpopular...

...s primary loyalty is to the electorate who after all have put him where he is...

...But a center party working against both the Conservatives and the Labor party, allied in some loose way with the Liberals, would constitute a real danger to a Labor victory...

...Report from Britain WHY LABOR SPLIT REPRESENTATION & ACCOUNTABILITY IN ORDER to follow the present troubles in the Labor party it is necessary for the reader to understand some of its essential structural features...

...If an M.P...

...Underlying the present turmoil, the basic question is that of the balance between these various groups...

...Because it is at the conferences that constituency party members are best able to make their voices heard at the national level, and because the M.P.s are heavily outnumbered by other groups, the tendency has always been for the resolutions passed at the conferences to be of a more radical nature than the general policy of the party as a whole...

...So the issue involved here is both one of democratic theory and political expediency...

...Yet at present Social Democrats seem to have set their face against nuclear disarmament for Britain...

...This concept of democracy will tend to see M.P...

...The question is, "Who should decide what is to go into the manifesto...

...The committee is largely composed of trade union leaders and M.P.s but not exclusively so...

...In other words, they fear that a manifesto written by the party as a whole, rather than by the M.P.s, will be likely to kill any chance the party may have of reelection...

...Certainly a number are sympathetic to the new break-away Social Democratic party led by Mr...

...One of the most important ingredients of the mix at the present time is the upsurge of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament...

...This may make them unpopular with the electorate-though since British electors are notoriously unaffected in their voting by foreign policy matters, it may be easy to exaggerate the importance of popular hostility to the Common Market...

...The key committee of the party as a whole is the National Executive Committee, which is elected to run the party organization and to determine general lines of party action...

...However, there are moves afoot to create a process of compulsory re-selection between elections, in order to make sure the local party organization has some control over the behavior of 'its' member for the lifetime of the parliament for which he is elected...

...and therefore, whatever the party activists or even the party conference may say, the M.P...

...Many of them are sponsored by trade unions, but even so they have to be selected (or removed) by the committees of the local constituency parties...

...has the threat of not being chosen the next time round hanging over his head (the theory goes), he is more likely to toe the party line than he would be if he had no qualms on this score...

...for the proposals which were finally ratified at the most recent party conference emphasized the idea of accountability to the party and its organization, and went against the theory of democracy which says that M.P.s are essentially free agents operating according to their own consciences (and that the Prime Minister is simply the leader of this group of free agents...

...indeed, as may be well known, the secretary of the campaign is a Catholic priest who (though reluctant to admit it) is a Mon-signor no less...

...The British constitution is such that there is inevitably a tension between the role of the M.P., as a representative of those who elected him, and his or her role as somebody chosen to put the views of the party as such before the nation in the House of Commons...

...They might have some chance of gaining support at the constituency level but will it be enough for them to get anywhere at an election...

...The trade unions are very divided on this issue, especially at the practical level, when defense policy changes seem to threaten even more jobs than are threatened already...

...The pressure for a change in the means of choosing the leader came largely from the more radical elements among the constituency parties, aided and abetted by a small number of Labor M.P.s led by Mr...

...Thirdly, one has to take account of the Labor M.P.s in the House of Commons...

...This is another example of the "delegate" theory of democracy creeping into the party ideology...

...However remote the possibility may be, there seems something wrong with the idea as a matter of principle...

...The engineering union even went so far as to vote against any proposal which gave the Labor M.P.s less than 75 percent of the votes on this crucial issue...

...This is where the greatest dilemma in British politics lies...

...It would certainly seem odd for the leader of the Labor party to be chosen by people who are not even members of that party...

...This is that if the leader is to be chosen, not by "one man one vote" elections by all the paid-up party members, and not by the M.P.s, but by a "college" made up very largely of trade union leaders, then it could easily happen that the choice of leader would depend on the votes of those who are not members of the Labor party at all (for it has to be remembered that there is no compulsion on a union to elect as its leaders men or women who are members of the Labor party...

...They are made up of thousands of volunteers who have paid their subscriptions to the party and who do most the work of keeping electors in touch with party matters and of getting out the vote at election times...

...On the contrary, several of the largest unions voted in just the opposite way (the engineers being the most vociferous on this...

...But meanwhile it seems likely that disputes within the Labor party, and the labor movement, will continue to attract a good deal of attention and energy...

...Benn and Mr...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that the people who hold the key to Labor party power in the constituency parties are those most alive to the social ideals of the party...

...Tony Benn and Mr...

...Heffer, and they would undoubtedly vote Social Democrat in preference either to Labor or Tory...

...Secondly, there are the trade unions, most of which are affiliated with the party and a portion of whose members' subscriptions goes directly into Labor party funds...

...For this reason the Conservative government may get an easier ride than it deserves in the next year or two...

...A minority of trade union members are, for example, members of the Communist party...

...he or she should subordinate personal views to the wishes of the organization which has after all worked hardest to put him or her at the center of power...

...At any rate the ideological links between big business and the Conservative party are not so very different in scope from the links between the trade unions and the Labor party...

...The "social democrat'' will tend to say that M.P.'s are elected by, and are thus responsible first of all to, the voters...

...Others could easily be members of the Conservative party...

...Another point of argument at the present time concerns the party manifesto, i.e., the policy "ticket" on which the party stands at a general election...

...The current debate over the best way of choosing the party leader is really only a symptom of this underlying division of views about the nature of democracy itself...

...This seems doubtful...

...On the other hand, another view tends to suggest that parliamentary elections are not the only places where democracy occurs, and that an M.P...

...At a lower level, there is also at present a controversy about the selection, or rather re-selection of candidate M.P.s, between elections...

...The Social Democrats are also supporters of NATO and Britain's membership in this alliance and indeed of the retention of the British nuclear deterrent as part of the Western defense forces...

...many voters are persuaded at the present time by hostile media coverage of the activities of the Labor party "radicals" led by Mr...

...Thus it is probably true that the Conservative party is as indebted for its finances, if not for its organization, to business as the Labor party is to the trade union movement...

...On the side of the "radicals" is the concept of democracy which I have already described, which insists on the importance of the accountability of members of the House of Commons, and especially the Prime Minister, to the party of which they are the elected parliamentary representatives...

...I think it should be noted that there is a manifest contrast between the way the two major parties are treated and the way the Conservative party is treated in the media...

...In recent years that means a tendency to be more radical and "left-wing," precisely because it is the radicals who have the enthusiasm and the determination to keep things going through thick and thin...

...First of all there are the constituency Labor party organizations...

...It is chaired by the leader of the party...

...But a good deal can happen between now and the next general election and it is not easy to forecast with any certainty what may happen to the party between now and the next time the voters have a chance to look at it long and hard...

...The top trade union leaders are far from being unanimously radical, let alone revolutionary...

...Many of them are among the most conservative and traditional of the party's leading members, and as a whole they split very evenly across the whole spectrum of party opinion...

...How far there is a real fellow-feeling between the Liberals and the Social Democrats is not easy to ascertain, although at times the Liberals seem (and at all times they say) that they are a party of radical change and a genuine alternative to either of the larger groups...

...Eric Heffer...

...They have had to learn the hard way that politics is the art of the possible...

...and because they are at the center of legislative power they inevitably have a key place in the party organization and structure...

...Hence the Social Democrats have no financial or organizational basis either in the work place or indeed in constituencies...

...On the whole the M.P.s in the House of Commons are less radical in their outlook than the constituency members, or indeed many trade union leaders...

...One can understand this argument when, as recent history tends to suggest, it becomes ever more frustrating for active party workers, who spend a large part of their lives working for a particular cause, to find that despite all their hard work, the cause has been lost because of the freedom of action of M.P.s to think and vote according to their own opinion and not according to those of the party they lead...

...To sum up then: the Labor party is in a good deal of a mess, and the reasons are complex and solutions intractable...

...who has been chosen to put his party's point of view should be accountable to the party for his parliamentary behavior as well as to the electorate...

...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...

...When the chips are down, most Liberal voters would, I think, prefer a Conservative to a Labor government in power...

...Ironically in doing so it quite possibly allowed the new system to go through, instead of supporting the more moderate proposals of some other trade unionists...

...Furthermore, they have as yet no clear power base in the country...

...It is true that lately the C.B.I, has been at odds with the Thatcher government over matters such as interest rates and the squeeze on industrial investment...

...One group argues that the manifesto should be written by those who will have to put its policies into practice if the party is elected, i.e., the Members of Parliament with the party leader as the driving force behind them...

...Yet whereas trade unions get a more or less continuous barrage of hostile comment from the media, the Confederation of British Industries gets very little publicity at all, except when industrial or economic matters are under discussion...

...and this means that the trade unions wield immense "bloc-votes" which can be put into play at national conferences...

...On home affairs, however, policies of the Social Democrats are as yet very far from clear...

...However, the other view tends to be that the manifesto is an expression of the will of the party as a whole, as expressed, for example, through resolutions passed at the annual conference, and through the collective decisions of the national executive council...

...One or two union leaders, such as Frank Chappie of the Electricians, might do so but disaffiliation from the Labor party by trade unions on a large scale seems extremely unlikely...

...On the whole the Social Democrats as a group support the European Economic Community and Britain's membership in it very strongly...

...The trade unions in Britain are the bankers of the party and because they hold the purse strings they possess a great deal of the power...

...But politically speaking trade-unions are a very varied set of forces...

...A second major source of their power in the Labor party, apart from finance, rests on the fact that their members are automatically affiliated with the party unless they choose to "contract out...

...There are two concepts of democracy at work in achieving the right balance here...

...It is of course precisely for this reason that the Social Democrats tend to oppose compulsory re-selection of M.P.s between elections...

...Since the national executive is at present dominated by the more radical members of the party, the Social Democrats naturally fear that a move in this direction would tend to "radicalize" the manifesto, perhaps to the extent of making it totally unacceptable to the electorate...

...It looks to me as though there is every chance that the Tories might lose the next election since there is no real sign as yet of the recession bottoming out in Britain...

...The labor party conference is the one national annual get-together of representatives of the whole party...

...A good many people therefore may feel torn between support for a party which is against nuclear weapons on the one hand, and support for a group on the other which represents their notions of how socialism should be achieved by parliamentary means...

...My own view, for what it is worth, is that the Social Democrat center will not amount to much in the end...

...Although a good many trade unionists are probably sympathetic to their point of view, it seems most unlikely that any large trade union will sever its links with the Labor party and join a new centrist group...

...It is far from the case that all nuclear disarmers are Marxists or Trotskyites...

...whereas the Labor party, as at present constituted, and certainly the more radical elements in it, are firmly committed to just this cause...

...as a delegate rather than as a personal representative...

...That is to say, their hostility towards such things as nationalization and any increase of trade union power is greater than their hostility to big business and monetary theory...

...This is partly because it is very uncertain how far they will wish to make common cause with the Liberal party between now and the next election...

...Roy Jenkins and the so-called "gang of three," i.e., Shirley Williams, William Rodgers and David Owen...

...The issues at stake in this matter are important...

...For example, it is certainly not the case that the trade union leaders were unanimous in wishing for a larger say in the choice of the party leader...

...Against this argument, however, is another which is almost as powerful...

...I suspect that a good many people who are Social Democrats at heart, for idealistic reasons, are also nuclear disarmers for similar reasons...

...and it was on this decision that Hugh Gaitskell, then leader of the party, vowed to oppose the conference resolution, and to "fight, fight, and fight again" to reverse the party's conference commitment on this issue...

...What are the chances of the Social Democrats actually building a successful new party between now and the general election...

...but in general big business does not get anything like as much exposure, and certainly nothing like as much hostile exposure, as the trade unions...

...These obviously vary in number from election to election, but they constitute the pinnacle of the party's organization...