THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY & THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS

...The LiberalSocial Democratic alliance has first to achieve substantial representation before it can change this system to its own advantage...

...The "Gang of Four" have in effect appealed to a new following, from the "middle ground of politics" over the heads of the existing organization, relying on their undoubted personal popularity and the sympathy of the mass media to recruit them a new following...

...The conclusion they drew was that the Party's relationship with the unions was altogether too close, and too subordinate, and that it had failed to bring about the necessary reforms of trade-union structure...

...There is the sense by both right and left that the old compromises have been exhausted, even if neither side has yet worked out much to put in their place...

...Its internal divisions are deep, and the Party faces the problem of holding its increasingly radicalized union and socialist following together while not becoming identified as an extremist party...

...The electoral system in Britain is heavily stacked against minority parties...

...Polls have shown that even at the point when high taxes seemed most unpopular, majority opinion was still unwilling to sacrifice standards of social service to achieve tax cuts...

...While their formal policy commitments are few, it is possible to gain a more detailed impression of their likely direction from David Owen's and Shirley Williams's recent books...

...The National Health Service, the state school and higher education systems, and many other areas of recently increased provision have a large middle-class as well as workingclass clientele...

...But they do demand urgent address...

...One has the sense that the erosion of membership and stagnation of organization has taken a serious toll...

...4 The dislike of the Labour partytrade union connection—which is also perceived on the Party's right as being an electoral liability—explains much of the hostility to the recent constitutional changes in the Party, which give the union membership no less than 50 percent of the votes in selecting a Party leader...

...There is an urgent need for a program of party renewal...

...Given that alternative, the electorate may well choose moderates who are younger, more personable and articulate, and who seem to believe they are saying something new...

...There needs to be some maximalism in thought, but sensitivity and caution in political action...

...From the point of view of the Social Democrats, these disputes with the left go back at least 20 years, to the "revisionist" thinking and political practice of Anthony Crosland and Hugh Gaitskell...

...Whereas the new reforms sought to give some rigor to these old conventions, as a result of a more class-based analysis on the Labour left, for the party's right they demonstrated how unacceptable the conventions had now become...

...The Trade Union Congress (TUC), usually a moderate nonideological body, also• argued for more growth-oriented economic policies, including import controls and public investment, but was largely ignored...

...The truth of the matter is that socialist ideas have never had less purchase than they have now on the minds of the British people, including its working class...

...Unions have always controlled Party conferences and elections to the National Executive Committee through their preponderant vote, and of course parliamentary candidates have always been nominated initially by the local Party membership, even though once elected there has been a custom of virtually life-long tenure...

...Not only is the social basis of the Thatcher government very narrow and are the interests potentially mobilized against it very large, but it also seems likely to be unsuccessful in its strategy...

...Labor's problem in Britain (and internationally, since these problems cannot be solved in one weak country), is to devise socialist solutions that, like the program for social reconstruction of the postwar period, become part of the popular consciousness...

...Shirley WilIiams, in her recent book, I seems prepared to concede it was this, though in general the attitude of the Labour right is much more hostile to the unions...

...Foot, whose first steps in the leadership gave an encouraging priority to extraparliamentary mobilization on unemployment, appears to be spending much time trying to hold the Party together, and especially to discourage further pressure by the left, for example, in Tony Benn's recently announced candidacy for the deputy leadership now held by Denis Healey...

...the purpose is to show that even gradualists who favor the long-term abolition of private capital, in some sense or another, are unavoidably totalitarian...

...Labour had been elected in 1974 because of its supposed ability to work with the unions (after the 1973 miners' strike against the Heath government), and it was then heavily defeated on the evidence of the breakdown of this "special relationship...

...There is no doubt therefore of the deep opposition of the unions (which recruit 55 percent of the workforce) to Thatcherism, and it is the unions that have kept the Labour party financially and organizationally afloat for some time...

...But if one is hostile to the whole concept of a class party, then such a constitutional connection becomes anathema...

...But there has been a quite 305 excessive concentration on the mechanics of internal party power, and a quite unrealistic assumption that the activists of the Labour left, if only they had more leverage over their party machine and its elected leaders, would quickly bring themselves in sight of socialism...

...These reforms would strengthen, rather than constitute a fundamental break with, Labour's constitutional traditions...

...The conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s had involved some substantial exchanges of ideas— among, for example, Crosland, Crossman, Castle, and such allied academics as Townsend and Abel-Smith...

...Not least, Wilson's leadership was successful in making Labour into a credible "party of government" in 1964, 1966, and 1974, and power or its prospect held the Party together, or drove dissenters away from it...

...For its social democrats, the Labour party has appeared during the last few years to be lacking coherent ideas or principles, dominated by the trade unions, and increasingly permeated by a militant and in their view partially totalitarian left...

...It is not that these problems have simple solutions, or that socialists have blueprints...

...3 David Owen, Facing the Future (Jonathan Cape, 1981...

...In its self-proclaimed role as the "only alternative" for Britain, the government has been given the benefit of many doubts by the Conservatives' natural supporters in industry and finance...

...2 Samuel Beer, Modern British Politics(Heinemann, 1965...

...The Social Democratic break is in this sense a preemptive move, setting itself against a radi303 cal left program that can be encapsulated in a number of hostile formulas—"the siege economy," neutralism, state centralism, totalitarian party organization, and so forth...

...S0 far as the remainder of the Labour party is concerned, and especially its left, recent preoccupation has been mainly with the constitutional questions of internal power, not with programs, organization, or theory...

...Whether Labour still has the capacity to respond to this challenge is a question...

...Britain does not have a substantial agricultural population able to support a Liberal party, as West Germany does, and regional loyalties in most peripheral parts of Britain tend to go to nationalist groupings, not to a center party...

...6 I discuss these constitutional debates more extensively in "Different Conceptions of Party: Labor Constitutional Debates," in New Left Review, March-April 1981...

...But nevertheless, the right has been markedly on the defensive and is faced with a climate in which the pressure will be toward more radical policies, as the recession deepens and Thatcher's neocapitalist experiment arouses deeper opposition...

...The arms race is in a chronically worsening state...

...This general conception of the Labour party as a collective entity, which determines policies by vote and then submits them to endorsement by the "mandate" of the electorate, arises, as Samuel Beer has pointed out,2 from the idea that the Party represents the working class...

...The battle for position between left and right is an essential one, determining the shape of subsequent compromises, even though one hopes for more creative terms in this necessary argument...

...Yet while one response to nuclear anxieties has been a small boom in private bomb shelters, a much more influential response has been a revival of the nuclear disarmament campaign, especially among the young, and now on a wider, European basis...

...In this respect their works differ substantially from Crosland's Future of Socialism of 25 years before, which grounded its revisionist program in a sociology of power and ownership...

...5 Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge University Press, 1978...

...It has been a radical criticism of the British welfare state that it is operated too much to the advantage of the privileged, and one might therefore expect that a very broad social constituency could be mobilized in its defense...

...But in the later years of Wilson and Callaghan this relative fertility of ideas diminished and there was a steady leakage of some of the most intelligent proto-social democrats— David Marquand, Brian Walden, Roy Jenkins, for example—out of parliamentary politics...

...The Party needs to replace its intellectual capital, and create a larger body of "organic intellectuals" committed to its programs of reform...

...While asserting a modified socialist ethic of equality and freedom, both Owen and Williams appear to have abandoned, if they ever had one, any sense of historical transformation, the common agenda of all socialist movements...

...It has elected the parliamentary leader and the shadow cabinet (those who hold major positions while in opposition...

...Notes All publications cited below are British...

...This requires some considerable political resource, and it must be said that at the moment the parliamentary Labour party shows few signs of possessing it...

...Such connections as it has had have been mainly with ultraleft groupings, hostile to gradualism and consequently unable, in English conditions, to build lasting organizations or retain their transient followings...

...These constitutional changes were therefore the precipitating cause of the Social Democratic break...

...The unions during this period were able to extract concessions to their specific interests, but were not able to influence overall economic policy...

...But confidence is now wearing very thin indeed, with an overvalued sterling currency, high interest rates, sharply reduced profits, increased bankruptcies, and 300 poor prospects for economic growth...

...So from their point of view, the need to assert a greater degree of union and party control over the parliamentary and prime ministerial leadership seemed a reasonable objective...

...q 307...

...I Shirley Williams, Politics is for People (Penguin, 1981...

...There is a systematic idealism and inflation of the role of political brokerage and a denial of the intractability of conflicting social forces...

...Labour's right-wingers have found themselves in the last few years at the losing end of a whole series of votes on substantive policies, for example, on nuclear disarmament, public ownership, and withdrawal from the EEC (the Common Market...

...Crosland, in his writing, and Gaitskell, through his leadership, attempted to transform the Labour party into a modern, "classless" and nonideological equivalent of the post-Bad Godesberg West German SPD...

...They have not found a means of redistributing enough resources to the Third World to regenerate growth both in poor and rich countries...

...The general hegemony of the right and center over the Labour party, and their ability to use the Party constitution to maintain domination, was little in dispute...

...Callaghan was the candidate of the nonintellectual trade-union center, philistine and hostile toward ideas and ideology in any form...

...A pluralist socialism is not an easy concept, but it will not be advanced without more serious engagement with these issues, nor by an apparently fundamental commitment to preserve the existing powers of capital...

...What was in fact the period of the highest living standards in Britain's history, and of the greatest advances in public services and social rights, has been redescribed as a time of failure, legitimizing the most misguided of radical experiments from the right...

...it was paradoxically reaffirmed by Gaitskell's success in 1961, reversing the preceding year's unilateralist conference vote...

...if achieved earlier, it might have prevented Labour's subsequent defeat...

...One has the feeling from David Owen's book that he believes all problems should be amenable to rational, pragmatic solution, if only disinterested attention is given to them...

...But support for these reforms extends much more widely * The parliamentary Labour party (the PLP) is the totality of Parliament's Labour members...

...The Labour party has always had a collective conception of itself, holding that policy is made by party conferences, and treating the parliamentary Party leadership as in theory responsible only for the tactical implementation of "Manifesto" pledges...

...In this debate, 6 the social democrats first asserted that parliamentary representatives [MPs] were in effect sovereign and should not be accountable to any interests or membership outside...

...Nor is there any probable long-run change in the bargaining strength of labor to show for the sacrifices—the National Union of Mineworkers was able to inflict another noteworthy pay-bargaining defeat on the government in December...

...Nevertheless, the explicit attack on many of its assumptions (the necessity for state intervention in the economy, the virtues of increasing equality, the need for state-supported social services) seemed to galvanize a defensive commitment from many beneficiaries of this long period of social reform...

...Having obtained a high degree of cooperation from the unions, and having been able to offer some tangible reforms in return (employment protection, industrial safety, and equal pay legislation being the main ones), the leadership then squandered this success through the misjudgment of a 5 percent (subinflation rate) compulsory pay norm in the autumn of 1979...

...David Lipsey and Dick Leonard, eds., The Socialist Agenda (Jonathan Cape, 1981...

...Yet there has been a striking development of a radical and Marxist subculture in Britain the last 15 years,'which should be a resource (though it has yet to be) for a mainly workingclass party...

...It would be likely then to introduce proportional representation, and a state subsidy to political parties, to diminish the advantage to Labour and Conservatives of having the financial support of organized labor and capital...

...At the point of Callaghan's election against Foot, some right-wingers even expressed a preference for Foot on grounds that his leadership might bring about a greater clarity of principle...

...The Social Democrats can perhaps be understood as the separatingout of a tradition of collectivist liberalism from the Labour party into which it became absorbed early in this century...

...The Labour party has not even managed to create a theoretical journal, though this is now being remedied...

...Later the emphasis of their argument shifted to a critique of "minoritarian" activism and participatory decision-making, and to an advocacy of the secret ballot by all Party members...

...He was also the social democrats' strongest candidate for the post-Callaghan leadership, and therefore their best hope of achieving ultimate hegemony over the Party as a whole...

...Anathemas of the extremes are the principal stock-in-trade of the new party at present, and their leaders must hope (not without some reason, it must be added) that grossly ideological commitments by both their antagonists will deliver them a majority...

...This paucity of intellectual production is in marked contrast to the efforts of the many research organizations that have nurtured the development of Britain's New Right...

...It has not been under the direct control of the Labour party's National Executive Committee or its annual conference...

...Only the election of the leader has hitherto been wholly a parliamentary prerogative, and one could argue that this is an anomaly, given that the parliamentary leader [the potential prime minister] is also the leader of the national Labour party...

...Yet the anxieties of Social Democrats about the Labour party's direction are not mirrored by optimism on the left, which sees itself for the most part in a rather weaker position than these fears would imply...

...he had angered some of the right-wingers by undermining the trade-union legislation of 302 the Wilson government—Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife proposals—for what were felt to be opportunistic reasons...

...It is not, however, only a matter of constitutional principle...

...301 than their common reduction to the results of sectarian infiltration suggests...

...In Owen's book too there is a discrepancy between the identification of large concentrations of capital, and the absence of measures to control or disperse them...

...This radical culture has been largely divorced from actual politics, and has had little or no effect on mainstream debate...

...While the Conservative government has been cautious in its approach to legal restraints on trade unions, its hostility to unionism is clear, and is being given effect through the discipline of unemployment...

...The capitalist economies have not succeeded in resolving 306 the problem of oil surplus, recession, and technological unemployment...

...The situation, while depressing to live through, has seemed to offer an opportunity for an effective Labour alternative...

...While Gaitskell was defeated in the attempt to reform the Party constitution in 1959, there was at the time no question of a split from the right...

...Elsewhere in her book she does note the extreme and unusual degree of concentration of capital in Britain, but offers only the encouragement of small businesses as a response...

...The argument about the Labor party constitution, for instance, is a clear polarization of rival liberal and collectivist conceptions of the political party...

...The Labour party's base in the unions and the Conservatives' in private business is a substantial resource, whatever the immediate electoral unpopularity of these connections, and Labour may again succeed in making its capacity to work with the unions an electoral asset, as it was in 1974...

...Many of the unions have an interest in reform, and in addition one should note that the younger membership of the Party includes better educated white-collar and professional workers from the public sector who have been influenced by the radical culture of the late 1960s and 1970s, and who have a correspondingly more demanding conception of membership...

...Labour's capacity to deal with its conflicts in intellectual terms during this period seems in fact to have markedly diminished...

...The Liberal party is generally rather antipathetic to egalitarian values and to the state interventions that enforce them, and this may be an important area of disagreement...

...Capitalist elites have become frightened of the redistributive pressures from increasingly prosperous and educated populations and, being unwilling to contain them through further concessions of rights and powers (for example, across the threshold of industrial democracy), are instead using deflationary and even toying with repressive means of control...

...With this analysis, the Social Democrats no longer recognize the need for a substantial class basis for their own politics, though in reality no major move toward equality or socialism seems likely to derive from anything else...

...The Labour party has often enough been a shambles in the period between elections, and yet been able to recover when the electoral conflict again became imminent...

...It needs to find a way of engaging with occupational and professional interests, and of politicizing them in some serious way...

...At the same time, a more ideologically militant membership was also pursuing the objective of greater rank-and-file control over the Labour party, through the instruments of mandatory re-selection of MPs and the election of the Party leader by the constituencies, the unions, and the parliamentary Party together, instead of by the parliamentary Party [the PLP] alone.* These reforms were pursued, over a number of years, with the benefit of a degree of factional and "entryist" sectarian organization in the constituency Labour parties and in some public-sector unions...

...The question that must be asked therefore of those who advocate such principles as Owen and Williams still do is: by what instrument are they to be furthered...

...What may we expect from the new Social Democratic party...

...Much reliance is placed on ethical principles, and on disinterested reasoning, as opposed to ideology and power...

...Meanwhile, the mainstream Labour response to the Social Democratic defection has been one of panic...

...Williams argues, by bare assertion, that political pluralism and private ownership are inseparable, without apparently recognizing that largescale private ownership of capital is inherently undemocratic and inegalitarian...

...For them, the lesson of the 1979 election defeat was more substantial than the merely tactical issue of Callaghan's maladroit handling of pay policy...

...If one defines the Labour party as a party of the working class, then this seems the most effective way of ensuring working-class control...

...Many social democrats have come to share a widespread establishment view that the unions represent one of the major problems of Britain's economic decline...

...Labour needs a much enlarged membership and funding...

...The government has demoralized its supporters through failing even by its own criteria—public expenditure has been impossible to restrain in the recession owing to unemployment compensation and nationalized industry deficits, and the "money-supply" has turned out to be hard to measure and harder to control...

...Callaghan's election, following Wilson, was in some respects worse from the right-wing point of view—not for reasons of leftism (Callaghan was deeply conservative in many ways) but on grounds of intellectual principle...

...Instead, what has happened is a major split, and the formation of a new Social Democratic party by four prominent members of previous Labour cabinets: Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams, and Bill Rodgers...

...It was, after all, the failures of pragmatism that got us into this crisis...

...Both Williams and Owen indicate some sympathy with a more idealistic and romantic politics of ecological, cooperative, or antimilitarist hues, while being in all cases hostile to the "harder" commitments (against nuclear power, private capital, or defense systems), which such politics commonly involves...

...Their fundamental analysis of the British social and economic structure and its problems does, however, appear to be somewhat shallow, and lacking a clear analytic basis...

...The commitment to strengthen the power of the Party seems a rational response to the appalling drift of the last two Labour governments away from the interests of their supporters, particularly under internal and external financial pressures...

...The Social Democrats' writings assert the world view and interests of the middle strata of society, hostile to the centralized bureauc304 racies of capital and labor, supporting small businesses, cooperatives, and voluntary effort, and seeking reconciliation and consensus between contending classes...

...Among the left, and also in the unions, the electoral defeat was undoubtedly blamed on the Labour cabinet's failure to stand up to the pressure of the City and the IMF (International Monetary Fund), and its consequent adoption of monetary restraint and a very severe incomes policy...

...7 The idea of workplace branches was discussed in theoretical terms in my article "The New Left and the Present Crisis," in New Left Review, May-June 1980, at the same time as it was being introduced as a constitutional change (adopted but not yet implemented) in the Labour party...

...This might be achieved either through a more political role being taken by trade unions, or through the incorporation into Party membership of occupational branches...

...The sense that progress is achieved by class forces acting against other class forces, however nonviolently, is absent from the Social Democrats' writing...

...Consumers of state-provided services in Britain extend across the social spectrum...

...These writers appear to be unaware of the contemporary discussion within the Marxist tradition of the differences between absolutist or Eastern state systems, and liberal or Western states...

...This equation of the mixed economy with political pluralism is elided with another quite different distinction between gradualists and revolutionaries...

...The truth is that the national (and international) situation does call for some more fundamental socialist programs...

...If some stronger connection between these cultural resources (themselves under the most direct attack from Thatcherism) and active politics could be made, there would be a chance for the needed renewal of socialist ideas...

...There is also anxiety on the Party's right that a new kind of membership is taking control of the constituency parties, and will be able to use mandatory reselection to intimidate MPs into compliance...

...Thatcherism has involved an explicit repudiation of the whole framework of postwar consensus politics, and has defined the policies of both the previous Labour and the Conservative governments as "creeping socialism...

...Socialism is interpreted in these discussions as a well-understood formula, requiring only determined propagation to be made real...

...Wilson's succession after Gaitskell's early death, and his successful transcendence (or evasion) of leftright conflicts through the rhetoric of technological "modernization" buried these disputes...

...In other labor or social democratic parties (for instance, the Social Democratic party[SPD] in West Germany) this problem is resolved by having separate parliamentary and national leaderships, and many right-wingers conceded that some form of representation of the ordinary membership in the election process would be legitimate...

...Crosland's early death may have been a particularly important event in this process of break-up, since he combined a commitment to the Labour party and its working-class following that seemed to grow rather than diminish as he grew older, with great intellectual and political authority on the Labour right...

...Marquand's important Encounter article in July 1979, "Inquest on a Movement," which sets out a case for the subsequent break, takes as one of its principal arguments the critical role of liberal intellectuals in the early days of the Labour party and their currently weak position...

...This is another issue where the Labour party has seemed in touch with public feeling...

...In combination with the Liberal party, they are currently receiving very high opinion-poll ratings—up to 46 percent of voter preferences —and must be taken very seriously indeed as potential holders at least of a balance of power...

...These factors should count in Labour's favor...

...These are, however, early days...

...In foreign and defense policy, Thatcherism offers no concessions to growing anxieties about nuclear war, except in a half-hearted campaign for increased civil defense...

...For a Conservative government, there now is unusually public and deep cabinet dissension...

...Owen has recently gone further—proposing computerized referenda by the whole membership of the new party...

...The object is to move the Labour party to the center, to cast off any stigma of extremism that might enable a Social Democratic-Liberal alliance...

...The recession of the 1970s left what we might broadly characterize as "social democracy" in Britain bereft of ideas and confidence...

...It can only do this by influencing, rather than merely following, the terms of the wider political debate, moving the electorate as a whole to a somewhat more leftish stance...

...The electoral alliance they need with the Liberal party will be a problem in this respect, especially since the Liberals, with their well-developed local organization, may well provide most of the troops...

...For the left and the unions, this seemed more than a tactical blunder...

...Neither organizationally nor intellectually are socialists equipped to bring about even a substantial program of reform...

...While the implications of this have hardly yet been spelled out, it is evident in the general hostility to "corporatism" expressed in David Owen's new book Facing the Future, 3 and in the recent volume, written in memoriam to Crosland, The Socialist Agenda...

...Opposite lessons have been drawn by the Labour left and right from the defeat of 1979, and it is the bitter interaction between the two and the collapse of any coherent middle that has precipitated this major break...

...Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 1979...

...Greater equality requires a reallocation of power, resources, or esteem, and will not be achieved through the expression of ethical principles...

...5 But while the Social Democrats are more reconciled to state intervention than the rural and small-business based Liberals, their immediate line of selfdifferentiation has been against the collectivism and statism of the Labour party, as Owen's and Williams's books made clear...

...This norm was unacceptable to Labour's union membership and precipitated a round of damaging public-sector strikes...

...The expansion of higher education and the effects of the various phases of the New Left, both in its more "English" and more Marxist and internationally oriented phases, has created a significant body of neoMarxist academic work, with left-wing minority journals in many disciplinary fields, and also with a considerable amount of publishing, left bookshop, and radical community activity in the cultural and social professions...

...It will be important beyond the British Isles if it can be convincingly demonstrated that the present problems of Western capitalism do require socialist analyses and solutions, rather than mere pragmatism, which is what the Social Democrats will offer...

...One might expect (as Owen admits in his book) that these policy commitments will in practice be moderated before an election...

...The setting-up of this new Party has been a remarkably leadership-dominated initiative, not the result of defections in the ranks of the Labour party or trade unions, which have so far been very few...

...These intellectual politicians were adept at compromise and adjustment, in the end valuing the unity of the Party above all...

...For a long period, the Party's articulate social democratic right found itself in a somewhat marginal position, at least as compared with its role under Gaitskell...

...The role taken by the Fabian Society throughout the history of the Labour party, in providing intellectual muscle, was always a somewhat elitist and stateoriented one, but it is now too restricted in style for the more participatory and pluralist politics of the present day...

...They might be tolerated in disuse, but their reimposition was intolerable...

...This is all understandable, but it will not be a sufficient defense against the Social Democrats to offer a merely duller and more conservative form of moderation, while under heavy internal attack from the left...

...There will be a determined effort by the center and right of the parliamentary Party and by the union leadership to modify some of the constitutional decisions of last December, and to prevent any further left-wing gains...

...This suggestion is made in Marquand's article, and a number of recent studies have explored this intellectual history...

...Curiously, hardly any program has been offered as yet by the new party, other than a commitment to the EEC, to Western defense with some unspecified multilateral initiatives toward disarmament, to decentralization (in very general terms), and to making the mixed economy work through greater "continuity" of policy...

...These are both quite serious and worthwhile contributions, declaring substantial commitments to equal opportunity in the spheres of welfare, education, and health, and a real concern over bureaucratization and centralization...

...One wonders how long, divorced from organic connection with working-class institutions and interests, the Social Democrats will find egalitarian commitments politically functional or even congenial to the new following they will recruit...

...The Labour party conference, dominated as always by the unions, passed many votes critical of the Labour government between 1976 and 1979, including demands for more expansionist and interventionist economic policies against the drift toward mild recession and monetary restraint...

...They have given their initial launch a somewhat middle-class flavor, by an unusual emphasis on telephoned subscription by credit card and one suspects, from the funds that seem available, that they have some liberal business backing...