BRITAIN'S MUDDLED MIDDLE
Peterson, Tony
Britain's muddled middle When Margaret Thatcher stood beside Ronald Reagan to promise that Great Britain would love, honor, and obey the United States until the nuclear holocaust doth us part, she...
...The new party is forging an electoral pact with the Liberals, and will almost certainly deliver a pledge to support a new electoral system based upon proportional representation...
...What are the real prospects for the Social Democrats...
...He, along with Thatcher, remains the best hope that Social Democrats have of taking office—by scaring the electors with the devil they know and the devil they don't know...
...The "Bennites" have called for the nationalization of the top 200 British companies...
...Reaction within the Labor Party has been surprisingly gentle...
...But her popularity at home is at low ebb, and there are those within her own party who hope to depose her before she can lead the Conservatives to a cataclysmic defeat when her mandate expires in the general election of 1984...
...When the Social Democrats are pressed to say why they really left the Labor Party, the name of Benn seems to tremble on their lips...
...In those circumstances, the Social Democrats could easily become the party of the moderate Right rather than that of the moderate Left...
...I detects feeling of relief within the Labor movement that at last the party can get on with fighting for its socialist principles without being hamstrung by the constant rightward drift of the defectors...
...But if a purged and socialist Labor Party comes to power, there will be a quantum shift in the Western alliance...
...They must also hope that Labor chooses Anthony Wedgewood-Benn as its next parliamentary leader when the new selection procedures commence...
...No one in British political life is as constantly vilified as Tony Benn, formerly Viscount Stansgate...
...It is also likely that at the next election the center parties will field only one candidate between them in each district...
...No one in Britain disputes that the birth of the Social Democratic party adds a new dimension to the political scene, but there is hot dispute over the significance of the new arrival...
...The left-wingers also want import controls, although they hasten to add that sucn controls must not be at the expense of the Third World...
...The only encouragement the Prime Minister has received this year is the news that her Labor opponents have finally torn themselves into two separate parties...
...More than anything else, that will depend on the leaders chosen by the parties for the next election...
...Its members in the House of Commons may indeed be mainly defectors from Labor, but in an election their support may well come from disillusioned former Conservative voters...
...Labor's call for a rapid disengagement from the approaching catastrophe could find as hearty a response from voters as is likely to be given to its calls for a deflated economy...
...If the Social Democrats do succeed, the North Atlantic alliance will proceed very much as before...
...His probable candidacy in 1984 is used to conjure up visions of Orwell's "Big Brother" taking office...
...Attacks on the Social Democrats in the House of Commons have been confined to demands that they do the "honorable" thing and resign seats to which they were elected by Labor voters as the officially selected candidate of the Labor Party...
...There seems to me to be a growing realization in the United Kingdom that Thatcher has allowed Britain to be set up as a prime launching site and the prime target in a war which gets ominously closer...
...When Benn recently declared his candidacy for deputy leadership of the Labor Party, he was greeted with shock and horror everywhere outside the ranks of the Party itself—and not a few grumbles from his colleagues...
...The elderly Michael Foot cannot be more than a caretaker waiting for the next long-term leader of the Labor Party...
...We're getting new members five times faster than we are losing them," said another...
...the Social Democrats must be hoping that the Conservative Party keeps her on as parliamentary leader, for then they could count on a massive vote from disaffected Tories...
...There is serious doubt that Thatcher will be prime minister after 1984...
...Enthusiasts for the new center coalition point out that if the Social Democrats can deliver votes on the same scale as the Liberals, then the coalition could easily become the next government for a nation grown weary of the perpetual switching between nationalizers and denationalizes, between the workers' lobby and the bosses...
...Britain's muddled middle When Margaret Thatcher stood beside Ronald Reagan to promise that Great Britain would love, honor, and obey the United States until the nuclear holocaust doth us part, she did not place much emphasis on the temporary nature of the contract...
...As the natural leader of the socialist end of the Labor spectrum, he is feared by the middle classes...
...If that's' how they feel they should have left years ago," one party worker said...
...The emergence of the Social Democratic Party came about as a reaction against the increasing polarization of the parties as the Tories moved farther to the right, and Labor to the left...
...The demons of communism will still be the greatest evil in need of exorcism, rather than the other demons of poverty, illiteracy, disease, and home-lessness...
...Tony Peterson (Tony Peterson reports from London for a number of newspapers in Australia and New Zealand...
...The nuclear missiles will stay, and Britain will continue to contribute its quota of ice to the Cold War...
...now they have an uneasy feeling that the birth of the Social Democratic Party may be a curse disguised as a blessing...
...But his power base in the party has been strengthened by the departure of the Social Democrats, and he may well be Labor's answer to Margaret Thatcher and the new center in the 1984 election...
...The press constantly portrays him as a wild-eyed fanatical simpleton pursuing a single-minded aim of turning the sceptred isle into a totalitarian labor camp...
...They only real uncertainty in British political life is how the voters would jump if that was the choice offered to them...
...It has been warmly welcomed by the existing center party, the Liberals, who have lamented for years the system which gives them fewer than 2 per cent of the parliamentary seats, although they consistently collect more than 15 per cent of the votes...
...For renouncing his inherited peerage, he is regarded by the aristocracy as a traitor to his class...
...The Cold War and the biting wind of depression could hand Britain over to Labor— even Labor under Benn—and in spite of the Social Democrats...
...Such an event would once have been greeted with jubilation by Conservative supporters...
...Benn and his supporters want a more full-blooded socialism...
...With the center of gravity of both parties so clearly separated, the increasing isolation of labor right-wingers led them to believe that they could go it alone in the vacuum between the main groups...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
