The Challenges Facing Britain's Social Democrats
GELB, NORMAN
ABROAD AND AT HOME The Challenges Facing Britain's Social Democrats BY NORMAN GELB LONDON FOR THE recently emergent Social Democratic Party (SPD), much depends on how Britain's dispute with...
...Whatever happens, Argentina's Falklands escapade has introduced a potentially explosive element to current British politics...
...The SDP still sometimes leads the polls, but no longer can it boast of the tremendous leads of its formative months...
...Britain's pride has been badly bruised...
...When this sort of nitty-gritty comes up, many who delightedly rallied to the party's baptismal "mold-breaking" politics step back to look at the organization again...
...Prior to his victory, everything had been sweetness and light in SDP ranks...
...Certainly tensions have already begun to surface...
...When Labor was in power in London, he declared, Britain was able to require the Argentines to mind their manners over the Falklands...
...Labor Party Leader Michael Foot made one of his most impressive speeches in months when he castigated Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for the Argentine takeover of the islands...
...And not only was there no single leader of the SDP, there was no leadership struggle...
...Labor is in a shambles, with its conflicting wings so fundamentally opposed to each other that in comparison the SDP's "Stop Jenkins" agitation seems like the most minor and amicable of disagreements...
...Such fears may well be excessive, and can in part be chalked up to post-launching tristesse...
...Such maturity has a sobering effect...
...Just a year ago, initiators of the movement were talking of perhaps waiting for him to come back to London from his temporary exile in Brussels before launching the party...
...Occasionally the party trails humiliatingly...
...Yet if the furor over the Falklands has temporarily eclipsed the SDP in the news, there remains the question of whether the taste of power will corrupt the group...
...His apparent preoccupation with the fine points of economic policy rather than social questions often makes him seem cold and remote...
...It very quickly attracted phenomenal support across the length and breadth of the country, as well as defectors from the ranks of Labor MPs...
...With the big guns of the Tories and Laborites trained on them, the Social Democrats can no longer get away with mouthing vague formulas for coping with the country's problems...
...True, at the moment there is a pause in Labor's right-left struggle for control...
...No sooner had Roy Jenkins, former deputy leader of the Labor Party, won a parliamentary by-election as an SDP candidate late last month, for example, than his colleagues began to wonder aloud if he would be the best choice as leader of the new party...
...Lately Labor spokesmen have been treating them as an enemy to be reckoned with, rather than a covey of misfits deserving nothing except ridicule...
...In sum, his public presence and attitudes are not likely to attract disgruntled Laborites...
...Williams and Owen are voicing the concern of many Social Democrats that their crusade to break down class barriers is not attracting as many Labor voters as they had hoped...
...Still, the exhilarating air of camaraderie that marked its first months has worn a trifle thin...
...Furthermore, not until Jenkins trounced his opponents there and was back in Parliament were the Social Democrats finally deemed serious challengers...
...They are being called upon to be specific about what they would do to deal with unemployment, relations with the unions, economic policy generally, defense spending, and a host of other issues...
...in general, the party could use an infusion of good fellowship to counter the growing suspicion that it is subject to the squabbling that afflicts Britain's two major parties...
...The elation that accompanied the founding of the SDP and its remarkable early success in attracting members could not be long sustained...
...After years abroad overseeing Common Market operations, he has lost whatever limited reputation he had of being a man of the British Left...
...But now, two of his most prominent associates—Shirley Williams and David Owen (both also former Labor ministers)—suggest it would be wrong to choose him as chairman...
...Thatcher's party can only hope its skittish supporters will believe that a vote for the SDP is a wasted vote...
...NOTWITHSTANDING the qualms over which side of the middle ground the SDP will hug, particularly now that the party has to face formulating a concrete program, Jenkins will not be an easy man to stop: His credentials are too impressive...
...Social Democrats are, of course, pleased with all the recruits they can muster...
...The party came into existence last year with a minimum of birth pangs...
...Its followers radiated an aura of unity and purpose that has long eluded both Laborites and Tories...
...Only a little more than one year old, the SDP has come of age...
...The question "Where are we going...
...He also demonstrated both political skill and personal courage in fighting the parliamentary by-election in the Hillhead district of Glasgow, a Tory stronghold for more than six decades where a defeat could have undermined his standing and seniority...
...Thus, regardless of what some of Jenkins' detractors may say, he has brought the SDP respect from its adversaries...
...But thai proposition is harder to sell alter the Jenkins victory at Hillhead...
...ABROAD AND AT HOME The Challenges Facing Britain's Social Democrats BY NORMAN GELB LONDON FOR THE recently emergent Social Democratic Party (SPD), much depends on how Britain's dispute with Argentina over the Falkland Islands proceeds...
...Yet they are the voters from whom the Social Democrats hope to gain the strength to win the next general election, which must take place by May 1984...
...In fact, recent by-elections, local elections and opinion polls indicate that the SDP is doing better at creaming off Tory defectors than wooing Laborites...
...There are those among the Social Democrats who shudder at the thought that Ken Livingstone, Left-wing chairman of the Greater London Council, may have been right when he scornfully quipped that the SDP would finally turn out to be nothing more than the Tory Party, Mark Two...
...There had to be a period of consolidation, of attention to organizational detail that is important albeit not nearly so much fun...
...Thatcher's handling of the imbroglio could override all other factors influencing British political developments...
...Nonetheless, many of them worry that if the current trend is maintained, instead of being the party of the center-Left (with the Labor Party whirling itself into the wilderness of extremism), they might find themselves superintending the creation of a new center-Right movement, rescuing vexed Tories from the wreckage of Thatcherism...
...Laborites cannot make too much of a fuss about that, though, because David Owen—now a leading member of the SDP—was the Labor Foreign Minister who managed the trick...
...No one in the SDP denies that Jenkins—who served as president of the European Community Commission before he returned to the domestic fray—is a man of stature, wisdom and political finesse...
...NORMAN GELB's book, The British, will be published in May by Everest House...
...It would be an exaggeration to say that the daggers are now out at SDP meetings...
...It nevertheless retains a number of advantages...
...In addition, his upper crust accent, a striking anomaly for the son of a Welsh coal miner, keeps class conscious British workers from identifying with him: One of the Labor jibes against Jenkins, for instance, is that he prefers claret to the working man's elixir, beer...
...is asked with increasing frequency...
...The Tories, in the meantime, are burdened by unrelentingly high unemployment and by a lack of signs that recovery is around the corner—not to mention the outrage over the Falklands...
...The Conservatives, recognizing the inroads the SDP has been making in their ranks, have sought to scare bolters back to the faith by warning that a vote for the Social Democrats "is a vote for Tony Benn" (who manages to retain titular leadership of the Labor Party's far Left...
...A new eruption of fratricide can beexpected at any time, though, and definitely no later than this summer when a controversial inquiry into Trotskyite infiltration of the Party is due to be released...
...Despite his sojourn in Brussels, he has had more experience in the upper reaches of British government than any of his rivals for the leadership...
...They suspect that Jenkins' image may be at least partly responsible...
...Strange as it may have seemed for a leader of the Peace Movement, he demanded the use of force if necessary to restore British dominion to those windswept specks of land in the South Atlantic...
Vol. 65 • April 1982 • No. 8
