Labor After the Tory Triumph

...He has firmly planted his banner there, to the great chagrin of Margaret Thatcher, and has an election victory behind him for his effort...

...The stakes were high: If elected, Labor planned to prod the nation off the path it has followed during 13 years of free-enterprise Thatch-erism...

...Conservative education policies, having left schools understaffed and in disrepair, were drawing widespread criticism...

...It had been confident of at last scoring a triumph, and its expectations were solidly reinforced by public opinion polls...

...The great achievement of [Margaret] Thatcher was to recognize that change and seek to cast it in her own image...

...Smith, Gould and other key Labor officials similarly made strong impressions...

...Its options are decidedly limited...

...And not only had many people without steadfast political allegiances simply tired of the Tories, but some party loyalists felt the same way...

...may acknowledge the change, but does not really understand it...

...On election day, Rupert Murdoch's mass-circulation Sun, famous for its daily topless Page Three Girls, devoted nearly its entire front page to blaring, "If Kinnock Wins Today, Will the Last Person to Leave Britain Please Turn Out the Lights...

...Nevertheless, when it came time to cast their ballots, the people said in effect that they no longer felt the Labor Party could be trusted with the fate of the nation...

...Since Smith enjoys greater support than Gould among Labor MPs and trade union leaders, he is the odds-on favorite to win the unenviable job of rebuilding the party...

...Two senior members of Kinnock's Shadow Cabinet, John Smith and Brian Gould, are competing for the post...

...The rejection reflects a transformation of British society that has taken place gradually over the last few decades...

...Membership in the European Community's expansive open market should be affording the country substantial economic benefits...

...Soon after the election, Neil Kinnock?who would be the Prime Minister now if the polls had proved accurate—conceded that Labor needed new guidance and announced his resignation as party leader...

...Understanding is only part of the task ahead—the easy part...

...By then the current recession, already beginning to wane, will probably be only an unhappy memory...

...In fact, the victory gained by Prime Minister John Major's Conservative Party may signal a radical change in the pattern of this country's politics...

...Day after day, too, editorials reinforced the news columns, warning readers that a Conservative defeat would mean certain doom for Britain...

...it would mean abandoning its central philosophy altogether...

...Labor must confront the fact that the propitious circumstances suggesting it would be the winner this year are unlikely to linger until the next general election...

...They are justified in railing against the pro-Tory tabloids, which savaged Kinnock and Labor tax policies in banner-headlined page one stories that lacked even a pretense of objectivity...

...At present, the Liberals are nearly as opposed as the Tories to Labor's welfare state schemes...

...Exactly what course Labor will finally take in trying to work out of its unhappy predicament will not be apparent for awhile...

...As Martin Jacques, the perceptive former editor of the recently expired British journal Marxism Today, has observed: "The 1980s marked a historic transition from a society of mass production, class-based identity and collectivism to a more individualized culture where identities are more numerous and more fluid and society is a more mobile affair...

...Inside, the paper printed an article by a psychic who revealed that given the opportunity, Joseph Stalin and Mao would have voted Labor...

...A replacement will be chosen in July...

...People were deeply worried about whether the government would emasculate or privatize the revered National Health Service...

...After more than a decade of Conservative rule, Britain was staggering through its longest recession since the 1930s...

...Such a move would amount to much more than revising the party's political program...

...But an alliance of this sort would not be easy to arrange...

...Hundreds of businesses were going belly-up each week...

...Capturing the middle ground from Prime Minister John Major will not be easy...

...Labor spokesmen have, of course, offered explanations and excuses for the choice made by the voters...

...The Opposition Labor Party has tumbled into confusion...

...Labor took 35 per cent, the Liberal Democrats garnered 18 per cent...

...In addition, scheduled electoral redistricting will no doubt yield a considerable advantage to the Tories...

...When all is said and done, though, the media cannot be held responsible for the election results...

...Labor was created as the party of the working class, at one point the overwhelming majority of the population...

...The unemployment rate was alarmingly high...

...The risk is that grass roots Labor voters alienated by the new party line might not be replaced...

...Postelection analyses have indicated that such press attacks, preposterous as they may have been, did serve to influence some of the voters in marginal districts...

...Everything from its structure and basic policies to the very reason for its existing will come under review...

...Tens of thousands of homes were being repossessed...

...Britons have demonstrated that for all of their concerns about the future of their health and education systems, they are opposed to the notion of raising taxes any higher than the comparatively low levels established by the Tories...

...Furthermore, the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to agree to a working arrangement with Labor unless it reformulates a number of its fundamental policies...

...What can be done to regain voter confidence after four consecutive losses is, to put it mildly, less than clear...

...With that in mind, Labor's new leadership will have to weigh the possibility of realigning Britain's opposition...

...Labor has itself flirted with the idea, but many senior party figures, citing Israel and Italy, say it would saddle the country with government coalitions that are fragile and prone to stagnation...

...together next time, provided the electorate is finally ready for a change, they might be able to form a government...

...To be sure, class distinctions have not disappeared here, but countless individuals who are by definition workers have climbed into higher income brackets...

...They own their homes, take holidays in Florida and care little about the plight of the "proletariat...

...Many of their values are, indeed, distinctly middle class, particularly their aversion to the new taxes Labor intended to impose on the well-off...

...Unless Labor manages to refashion its profile, it could spend the next few years in gloom, merely awaiting another defeat...

...To come to terms with that reality, Labor would have to jettison its long-standing campaigns for an equitable distribution of wealth and increased financing for public services...

...If Kinnock had previously struck voters as too lightweight to make a credible Prime Minister, he now gave the impression of possessing the proper gravity and leadership skills to take on the job...

...Instead, as it reels from the shock of defeat, the party finds itself facing a process of intense introspection...

...All that can be said with certainty at the moment is that if Labor does not somehow succeed in becoming more responsive to the demands of the electorate, it will remain Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition long after the 20th century has passed into history...

...Norman Gelb writes regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Scenarios and statistics were invented to dramatize the potential disaster, including false tables showing how much wage earners would pay in additional taxes...

...Moreover, in contrast to the Conservatives, who at times seemed resigned to defeat, Labor ran a sophisticated, tightly controlled campaign...

...Although the Conservatives won only 43 per cent of the vote, thanks to the first-past-the-post electoral system they managed to secure a majority in the House of Commons...

...The Liberal Democrats are determined to introduce proportional representation in Britain and give smaller parties a greater chance to participate in government...

...Despite the hammering by the tabloids, Labor went into the fray with what appeared to be a strong hand and there were good reasons to believe it would prevail...