Undermining Britain's Labor Party

...Kinnock has been careful not to fight the extremists head-on either, despite his fiery nature and his conviction that they are doing the country no good...

...As the party met, the nightly news was continually showing mob scenes of striking miners throwing bricks and bottles at the police, inflicting serious injuries, attempting to break through the barricades to prevent working miners from getting to the pits, and beating the luckless ones who didn't make it...

...One can find half a dozen putative millionaires on every block...

...In fact, it is not easy to understand why the extreme Left has been able to gather so much momentum in the Labor Party, especially at a time when greater moderation would clearly help it exploit the obvious drop in the fortunes of Thatcher's government...

...Without at least a semblance of unity, he knows, Britain's Socialists cannot even hope to win the next general election...

...Were it not for their chiliastic attitudes and behavior, Kinnock might have reason to be cock-a-hoop with optimism...

...Scargill will probably not be able to oust his rival...

...The British remain great innovators—in recent times they invented vertical-takeoff aircraft, the Hovercraft, medical scanner machines, and much else besides—but the person who builds the better mousetrap is widely regarded as too clever by half...

...He knows perfectly well, however, that the image of a police force wary of his party has now entered into general circulation, and will no doubt cost him a number of votes among those who fear the rapid growth of street crime and the increasing use of once-taboo firearms by Britain's criminals...

...The sensible measure was defeated by the activists, who want this decision to remain in the hands of the local executive committees...

...Perhaps Britain's Socialists are frustrated by the persistent failure of free institutions to give them the popularity they regard as their birthright...

...Labor, Walden suggests, "is the losers' party...

...So does Arthur Scargill, president of Britain's National Union of Mine workers, a revolutionary Socialist and class warrior who is unabashedly contemptuous of the courts, the police and the mass media...

...In effect bidding to take the leadership away from Kinnock, Scargill has told the Leftists that after years of demanding proper direction they finally have it—and should act accordingly...

...This overwhelming fact has inhibited him from doing anything that would decisively alienate the Labor Right or the Labor Left...

...For another, such Labor moderates as Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and Peter Shore still occupy positions of consequence...

...The real reason is that the far Left has managed to take control in many places and is preparing to "deselect" Labor MPs they disapprove of...

...The victory over Kinnock on this issue is likely to cause grief for such prominent figures as the party's Chief Whip in the House of Commons, Michael Cocks, who coordinates the workings of Labor's parliamentary group...

...Yet oddly enough, Walden goes on, this defeatist frame of mind actually makes Labor the nation's natural majority party: "Most Britons are losers by temperament and preference...

...Nonetheless, poor Neil Kinnock, harried by the snarling mice on his left, would no doubt be only too happy to suffer the indignity of coming up with a device for trapping them, pulling his party together, and leading it onward to victory...

...One of the most important attacks upon him has come from Jimmy Reid, a former Communist and leader of a long, bitter ship workers' strike that rocked the north of England back in the early 1970s, when Edward Heath was Prime Minister...

...London After a brief political honeymoon, Neil Kinnock, who assumed the Labor Party's leadership in October 1983, finds himself constantly plagued by the carping of radical activists...

...He made no specific references to Kinnock, whom he does not pretend to like or trust, but his audience understood what he had in mind...

...True, he has yet to lead Labor annual conference, held in Blackpool, seemed to indicate that the far Left is in full control...

...Now a member of the Labor Party, Reid warns that Scargill's approach to politics is superficial and undemocratic...

...Indeed, the party's recent televised Norman Gelb, the NL's London correspondent, is the author most recently of Less Than Glory: A Revisionist's View of the American Revolution...

...sometimes it sounds as if it approves of losing...

...The tricky balance has been very hard to maintain, though, in the face of the outspoken, angry activists who insist that he " Be realistic and demand the impossible...

...It is true that success is somehow suspect over here...

...Walden has something of a point...

...As part of his effort to restore confidence and lure people back to Labor's declining rolls, Kinnock pressed for passage of a resolution at the conference that would have had all of the party members in each constituency vote to choose their parliamentary candidate...

...How different we are in Britain...

...Winning is so coarse, so arrogant and strutting...

...So extravagant were these verbal assaults that the president of the Police Federation, the bobbies' union, wondered out loud whether his rank and file would be able "to serve the people of this country" should Labor return to power...

...A more tantalizing theory has been advanced by Brian Walden, an ex-Labor MP turned a television and newspaper personality...

...Moreover, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is bogged down in all sorts of difficulties...

...Strive and struggle and you will become rich is an American attitude...

...And Heffer knew exactly what he was doing, too...

...The implication was that whereas ordinary Laborites are sheep waiting to be led by anyone who sells them a newspaper, those in charge of the constituent organizations are too shrewd to be conned...

...These include Britain's ever-drooping economy, the endless miners' strike, and continually rising levels of unemployment —now higher, in absolute numbers, than it was during the Great Depression...

...In his earlier, Communist days he objected to de-Stalinization and once, on a visit to Moscow, criticized Nikita Khrushchev to his face for slighting the achievements of the late dictator...

...These critics complain that their chief—himself a product of the party's Left wing—has hedged and fudged instead of boldly marching his forces into combat against the wicked witch of Downing Street...

...For one thing, many of his fellow union leaders are quite bitter about the peremptory way he has run the protracted and damaging miners' strike—without bothering to ballot the membership on whether they wanted to go out...

...Yet speaker after speaker in Blackpool rose to condemn, not the hooligans and the strong-arm men, but what they were pleased to call police violence...

...They are currently keeping a low profile, but a truly serious move by Scargill would almost surely result in their finally mobilizing the party's more sober elements to counter the outlandishness of the activists...

...how optimistic its workers are...

...Unfortunately for Kinnock, his attempts to persuade the voters that his Shadow Cabinet offers the nation a credible alternative government have been hampered by the provocative utterances and actions of the Leftists, since the public correctly suspects that they would exert considerable authority and influence over policy-making were Labor to hold office again...

...AFTER BLACKPOOL Undermining Britain's Labor Party BY NORMAN GELB out of the wilderness it entered after its humiliating defeat by the Conservatives in June 1983, but he has himself succeeded in winning the respect of some of the disaffected electorate...

...It loves losers...

...Such problems would ordinarily put the Iron Lady in difficult straits...

...I never fail to notice when I am in the U.S.A...

...Already, a backlash against the miners' chief seems to be taking shape...

...At the conference, he was quite a forlorn figure: While a steady parade of radical speakers was called to the rostrum— one of them described Labor as the party of equality, against discrimination on grounds of race, sex or ability— Cocks was completely ignored by the chairman, Left-wing MP Eric Heffer...

...Scargillism is based on seizing power, not winning it," he says, and is characterized by "contempt for working people, who are seen as pawns to be used by an elite as they plan and scheme revolutionary change...

...It is the sort of thing Yanks do, not sharing, caring, loving, and compassionate Brits...

...Kinnock has tried to preserve some sort of equilibrium, condemning violence "from whatever source it comes...