BRITAIN'S RADICAL CENTER

...inhabitants of different planets...

...Would the Liberals and the SDP siphon votes away from the Tories and help put Labour into power (even as Foot was allowing the Trotskyite Militant Tendency to purge moderate left wingers in the electoral districts...

...After a lifetime in the mainstream or on the right wing of Labour—as deputy leader and the top official at different times for both economic policy and domestic affairs—Jenkins made a brave decision that conformed with his intellectual analysis of his country's politics...

...Thatcher consolidated her grip on the Tories, surmounting the challenge of former Prime Minister Edward Heath and his faction of moderates, whom she christened the "wets"—the term for school boys who refuse to play rough games...

...The far left and the far right fed parasitically off one another...

...The Tories in power attack labor and the Labour Party in power attacks industry...

...The trend to polarization pushes the two main parties farther and farther away from the sentiments of the vast majority of the people they are supposed to represent...

...Usually averse to wild swings in fortune, the British electorate was rushing to embrace the Alliance even though the SDP hadn't had time to develop a platform or choose an official leader...

...In any event, Thatcher and her clever political advisers turned the so-called "Falklands Factor" to Tory advantage...

...So although the Social Democrats share with both the radical right and the radical left the intention of attacking the class system in Britain, they draw no comfort from the convenient enemies provided by ideology...

...When the Labour opposition calls for the nationalization of more industries, increased state planning, and gigantic rises in government spending, the SDP recalls the sorry experiences of the past 15 years...

...Though this is accurate in the limited sense that their policies and ideals fall between the two extremes, such a portrait misses the essential point...

...Arthur Scargill, the hard-left leader of the miners who bears the eerie title of "president-for-life," used a flimsy pretext to call out his members without bothering to consult them through the traditional national strike ballot...

...Mistaken perceptions about the Social Democrats accordingly abound...

...The perennial problems with incomes policies in Western democracies is that they eventually crack, with unions and other pressure groups demanding even higher settlements in return for their sacrifices...

...The SDP faces no shortage of inertia in attempting to peel away anti-intellectual, harmful prejudices...

...The desire to divide undermines community...

...You are in favor of the right of dissent and the liberty of private conduct...

...If the Labour Party could get its act together, the Social Democrats and the Liberals could he quickly eclipsed, owing to the vicissitudes of an unfair electoral system—reform of which is the Alliance's top priority should it win an election or hold the balance of power in Parliament...

...Roy Jenkins, whose Dimbleby Lecture led to the creation of the Social Democratic Party...

...Today the two nations are the heavily industrialized north, dominated by Labour, and the more commercial, agrarian south, controlled by the Tories...

...If Foot was saying that the Alliance would take enough from him to put the Tories in power, and Thatcher was saying that the Alliance would have enough votes to put Labour in power, perhaps they were both right...

...Its political fate rests in the hands of the two largest parties, both of which have an interest in squeezing the center...

...What it lacked in passion, the manifesto made up in intellectual honesty...

...The disproportionate electoral system came into play, and between them the Liberals and the SDP took only 23 of the 635 districts in Parliament, but finished second in 312...

...ambitious, certainly...

...Many poor people depend on sadly inadequate benefits...

...In addition to gathering in all those not represented by the powerful pressure groups of the right and left, the Alliance now looked poised to replace Labour as the main alternative to Conservatives (who, it seemed, are always with us...

...This posture, in turn, seemed to vindicate the stance of the radical elements within the Labour Party, who gained the upper hand by arguing that trying to deal reasonably with the class enemy was nothing but an empty chimera...

...Amand's House, East Hendred, Owen at Castlehayes, Plympton...

...Not only must the SDP manage its delicate relationship with the Liberals, it must also try to convey a radical message...

...The Alliance rejects both...

...This is known as an "industrial policy" on the other side of the Atlantic...

...The question was no longer whether the Alliance had altered the British political landscape...

...Almost by definition the SDP could not declare war on the unions...

...The Alliance's proposal, which goes hand-in-hand with its incomes policy, is to increase profit-sharing and worker ownership of various enterprises...

...In the Tory Party, Thatcherites gained the upper hand by arguing that there could be no compromise with the unions or the hard-left activists...

...In the fields of foreign and defense policy, the Alliance platform voices strong support for NATO and British membership in the European Economic Community...

...Michael Foot, a weak leader despite his lengthy parliamentary career, became head of the Labour Party as the only candidate suitable to the far left...

...Rarely does a politician choose the more difficult option on the grounds of principle...

...The recession did its dirty work and inflation dropped precipitously from over 20 percent in 1980 to 5 percent...

...The 1970s in Britain had seen two failed efforts at moderate policies—the government of Edward Heath, a left-wing Conservative, from 1970 to 1974...

...During the SDP's early, heady days of 1981, many non-Conservative intellectuals who had become disgruntled with the Labour Party went over to the Social Democrats...

...Under the Tories "the dole"—unemployment insurance—costs Britain $25 billion a year, which amounts to twice the government deficit...

...Curiously, as Thatcher's difficulties build, the Alliance seems to suffer because the Tory wets smell an opportunity for recapturing the party...

...Its sensible plan would have increased the deficit by $4 billion—far short of Labour's $8 billion proposal and envisioned $18 billion "reflation ." The Alliance proposed an end to the "civil war" over the boundaries of public ownership and suggsted an industrial credit scheme to modernize private industry, with special attention paid to high-risk, new technology ventures...

...But "getting tough" on the unions in the SDP does not mean destroying them...

...The conditions for a new center surge are emerging...

...Yet each side needed the other in order to have someone to blame...

...Regrettably, both seem to have succeeded...

...Jenkins proposes, in sum, nothing less than a thorough transformation of British society, British politics, British values...

...But workers in the north will no doubt stay with Labour until its demise, giving the party controlled by a radical rump a power base of one-quarter of the parliamentary scats under the electoral regime, even if it should manage less than a fifth of the vote...

...A Labour voter, likewise, can never admit that a Tory might be correct...

...Because it is older than all welfare states, and more comprehensive than most, the British system of benefits is sluggish and expensive—with a potential for waste that would make anecdotalists like Reagan gleeful...

...A laissezfaire, anti-union revolution on the right mirrored a statist, proletarian revolution on the left...

...England, in Disraeli's classic 19th-century formulation, consists of "two nations . . .who are as ignorant of each other's thoughts and feelings, as if they were...

...Scargill has made no secret that he aims at revolution through confrontation with the elected Tory government...

...As it stands in Britain at the moment, and as the miners' strike shows, the two largest parties aim to use government to torpedo their adversary...

...To avoid these anomalies, the Alliance suggests replacing the various benefits by a single benefit tied to income, housing costs, and the size of each family...

...It means that you accept the broad line of division between the public and the private sectors and don't constantly threaten those in the private sector with nationalization or expropriation...

...Labour Party upheavals, internecine Tory battles, the contentious figures cut by the likes of Scargill and Thatcher all tend to make for excitement, even if they also make for disaster...

...Called "Working Together for Britain," it may have suffered from its refusal to eschew subtlety...

...In short, the SDP-Liberal program takes a wholly responsible attitude to the vexing problem of NATO defense and EuropeanAmerican relations...

...The radical unions obviously control the Labour Party...

...It was like a masscoming-out-of-the-closet," remembers one Oxford SDP city councilor...

...The British electoral system, like the American, contains a bias against third parties that lack a geographical base...

...On the contrary, it means democratizing them and thus taking power away from" the Scargills in order to extend power to individual workers...

...With Jenkins running in the by-election, the Tories were reduced to a stunning 7 percent, Jenkins picked up 43 percent, and Labour won with 49 percent—a triumphant defeat if ever there was one...

...But there is more, and as Jenkins talks, his radical goals begin to reveal themselves...

...They want to "break the mold" of British politics by assaulting the source of its shortcomings—class-based hostilities so deep that the economy is not susceptible to the moderate solutions that would balance fairness and efficiency...

...We cannot successfully survive unless we can make our society more adaptable...

...In a country that clings fiercely to its customs and conventions, all bets are off...

...Hence Social Democrats do not require the demonology that sustains the two extremes...

...All this sounds fine in theory...

...The remarkable ascent of the Social Democrats in the one year between their establishment as a political party and the Argentine invasion of the Falklands suggests that analogous yearnings exist in Britain...

...What David Owen describes as "the obsessive dogmas" of monetarism from above and nationalization from above—the invisible hand and the all-too-visible hand—must be abandoned...

...American proponents of neoliberalism will recognize the dilemma well...

...Each side blames the other for the country's manifest woes...

...Arthur Scargill, "president for life" of the National Union of Mineworkers...

...While Labour shrilly condemned Reagan and the Tories shrilly condemned the Soviets, the Alliance had trouble selling its defense plans amid all the rhetorical noise...

...The rise of Ronald Reagan on the radical right galvanizes liberals on the traditional left, and the battle lines are clearly marked out: employers versus employees, hawks versus doves, developers versus conservationists, and so forth...

...Fourteen moderate Labour politicians and one conscience-stricken Tory had defected to the SDP by July 1981, but nothing prepared the British public for the Warrington by-election of that month...

...A brief sampling of what the Alliance stands for, then, sets the Liberals and the SDP sharply apart from the two biggest parties...

...Like all genuine radicals, Jenkins searches for the roots of the situation he wants to change...

...By the time he gave his speech, Jenkins was watching with apprehension as Margaret Thatcher prepared to administer a dose of sadomonetarism and maso-economics to battered British industries...

...It needs an overhaul, and the Alliance manifesto explains why: "The original grand design of the Liberal reformer, William Beveridge, has been mutilated over the years...

...British commentators welcomed the initiative but remained skeptical of the chances for political breakthrough...

...Their paper biographies conjure up pictures of calm, dignified, English gentlemen...

...Margaret Thatcher has compared Scargill to the Argentinian junta and has called the miners "the enemy within," Thatcher seems to believe that her electoral victories allow her to pretend that 22 million workers do not matter...

...The SDP and the Liberals wanted to include Britain's independent nuclear deterrent in the START talks—a move that not only would have clarified the complications of arms control but also would have deprived the Soviets of their pretext for leaving the Euro-missile negotiations...

...Democratic centralism is what the Militant Tendency calls its ideal—just like Article 6 of the Soviet constitution...

...The belief that one side can prevail utterly in Britain's class war resembles the myopic mixture of naivete and hostility that leads some people to think that one side can prevail in a nuclear war...

...The Labour Party—the great British party of reform to which Keynes and the intellectual father of the welfare state, Beveridge, belonged—had not managed to acquire nearly as many parliamentary seats as they would have won in a strictly proportional electoral system...

...The effort to design policies conducive to the general good gets diverted into sectional struggles...

...To spur growth, the Alliance would rather establish a cooperative partnership between government, industry, and labor...

...Energetic, yes...

...The new Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, at first distanced himself from Scargill but quickly came under pressure from the far left to toe the radical line...

...You encourage them without too much interference to create as much wealth as possible, but use the wealth so created both to give a return for enterprise and to spread the benefits throughout society in a way that avoids the disfigurements of poverty, gives a full priority to public education and health services, and encourages cooperation and not conflict in industry and throughout society...

...The miners' strike and the Tory reaction shows in microcosm the scope and intensity of the familiar "British disease...

...Furthermore, the Alliance seeks to move away from excessive dependence on nuclear weapons for the defense of Europe, believing that stronger conventional forces would help to curtail the nuclear arms race...

...This concern for reducing British dependence on the American nuclear guarantee and cutting back NATO reliance on destabilizing tactical nuclear weapons would coopt the rising tide of U.S...

...This confusion occasions several predicaments...

...And a neurologist who contributes to journals of psychiatry...

...Instead of a basic benefit, which was to secure for the old, the sick, and the unemployed, a tolerable minimum standard of living as of right, we have a complex network of benefits dependent on 44 different means tests...

...In the 1979 general election, the Tories romped home in that constituency with 61 percent of the vote to Labour's 29 percent...

...And then the only radical revolution that holds out hope for Britain can proceed...

...The new Social Democrats offer something better...

...Pendular politics The adversarial nature of British politics, rooted in the entrenched attitudes of the class cleavage, has for too long led to automatic responses...

...In this light his assertions that only the Labour Party can control the unions looks hollow, even laughable...

...A year after the 1983 election and two years after the Falklands affair, the Alliance faces a crucial moment...

...Or would the vote split on the left and help keep the Tories in office (even as Thatcher was purging her cabinet of its few remaining wets...

...But in practice, the huge gulf between these antagonistic ways of looking at the world has only hardened the attitudes of the social classes on opposite sides of the ideological divide...

...Laurence Grafstein is studying at Oxford University, where he is president of the Oxford Union...

...Instead of turning away from the welfare state, as the Tories sometimes do, or turning away from its structural weaknesses, as the Labour Party does, the Alliance seeks a radical simplification of benefits programs...

...Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the dispute (both sides have justifiable complaints), the mutual declaration of war offers little reassurance for the baffled British people...

...In doing so he dismantled the first invisible barricade in Britain's longstanding class war...

...Less than five years later, the vision of Roy Jenkins—the bespectacled, balding, cerebral Labour Party stalwart—has upset all the British political certainties that have prevailed since the 1920s...

...The Social Democrats want to break the mold of British politics by assaulting the source of its shortcomings-classbased hostilities so deep that they block solutions that would balance fairness and efficiency...

...the deployment of "flying pickets" to intimidate the miners in more prosperous pits who continue to work...

...Some discover that if they work more, they become worse off...

...And Jenkins reaches a crescendo: "You also make sure that the state knows its place, not only in relation to the economy, but in relation to the citizen...

...Here the tricky task is that the radicalism of the message lies in its plea for reconciliation...

...When Thatcher invokes the Victorian values of thrift and discipline as a rationale for her policies, the SDP reminds her of the Victorian poorhouse...

...The SDP arose as a party of the radical center in precisely the context of the radicalization of the left and right...

...While appreciating the need for robust reform of British institutions, the SDP remains the party of reconciliation, not of confrontation...

...Then the scholar-politician briefly takes over, identifying one of those paradoxes common to the breed: "We need more change accompanied by more stability of direction ." In England, both the Labourites and the Tories have a stake in a class-ridden status quo...

...To keep inflation down as growth was rekindled, the Alliance declared its willingness to impose an incomes policy—wage controls—should the need arise...

...Harold or hope...

...The temptation to suspend judgment overwhelms the search for rational solutions...

...and the manipulation of his own union's decent communities for the sake of unreasonable demands and unattainable ends...

...But in attending to the great British battle between owners and workers, the Alliance did not neglect the need to address the problem of the poor...

...Perhaps the Liberals and the SDP would have enough votes from both major parties to form their own government...

...Labour, on the other hand, proudly pledged itself to a "massive" rise in public spending...

...People would bump into friends on the street and ask, 'You mean, you want to get tough on the unions too...

...Proletarianism, say the Trotskyites, will wipe away the exploitative remnants of capitalism while empowering the noble cause of trade unionism...

...In preparing for the 1983 election, the Liberals and the SDP put forward a manifesto that explains how they intend to translate the radical ideal of a classless society into concrete public policy...

...The surge showed no signs of slowing...

...Thatcher compares Scargill to Argentina's authoritarian dictatorship...

...Laissez-faire capitalism, say the Thatcherites, will help to erode the aristocratic vestiges of feudalism on the one hand and the dangerous power of trade unionism on the other...

...You use market forces to help achieve such objectives but do not for a moment pretend that they, unguided and unaided, can do the whole job...

...Instead, it was how the Alliance's large percentage of the vote in the next general election would affect the distribution of seats in the House of Commons...

...The theme that suggests itself is that British unity can be achieved only through greater individual control over personal affairs...

...Unlike its adversaries, however, the SDP refuses to turn a blind eye to half of the oppressive forces at work in contemporary Britain...

...Both aspirations depended on the perpetuation of a class-based view of British society...

...The state must know its place, which should be an important but far from omnipotent one...

...At that point, in January 1981, Owen, Shirley Williams, and William Rodgers abandoned Labour and joined Jenkins to form "the Gang of Four" and gave birth to the SDP on March 26...

...Either he could stay within the Labour Party, as habit and sentiment no doubt would dictate, and rely on the relatively right-Wing trade union leaders to pose a counterweight to the increasingly irresponsible but increasingly powerful left-wing activists...

...He had found pretexts each of the previous two years, but had lost the ballot of his members...

...It advocates the cancellation of the expensive Trident nuclear submarine program because defense strategists have yet to provide cogent rationales for building it...

...With 35 percent of the vote, the Alliance begins to accumulate parliamentary seats in proportion to its popular vote and the mold of British politics is broken...

...You want the class system to fade without being replaced either by an aggressive and intolerant proletarianism or by the dominance of the brash and selfish values of a 'get-rich-quick' society...

...Many stay in abject poverty because they fail to apply for benefits to which they're entitled...

...The SDP-Liberal Alliance now hovers at around a quarter of the vote in the polls...

...The unions "already have great industrial power, and significant political power as well...

...But his intervention in the Falklands, the very week Jenkins took his seat in the House of Commons, also became an indirect intervention in his adversary's domestic politics...

...Then Roy Jenkins tried his hand at another byelection, this time in April 1982 at Glasgow...

...The Tories called for extensive denationalization, the kind of approach guaranteed to induce industrial unrest...

...No one in British,politics, least of all Thatcher, reckoned on General Galtieri...

...Scargill's efforts to declare a national strike failed on two consecutive ballots...

...The Social Democrats simply vow to oppose unjustifiable concentration of corporate power on the left in the same way they oppose similar excesses in business, bureaucracies, and Britain's highly centralized system of government...

...Could the SDP do any better with the powerful miners, whose actions played a large part in bringing down both the last Tory government in 1974 and the last Labour government in 1979...

...The resolute approach had succeeded abroad, and many British voters drew the parallel to Thatcher's slogan at home: "There is no alternative...

...We're having a party In the months after Jenkins gave the 1979 Dimbleby Lecture, both Labour and the Conservatives moved inexorably toward extremes...

...Thatcher has succeeded in alienating almost every union member in Britain, presumably believing that her electoral victories allow her to pretend that 22 million workers do not matter...

...Unlike the Tories, however, the Alliance does not find the "more is better" school of weaponry attractive...

...David Steel—the bright, articulate Liberal leader who had masterminded the Alliance—and Jenkins could only smile as Foot and Thatcher fell over each other in predicting their own demise...

...The Alliance produced a scheme to cut unemployment by one million over two years by stressing economic growth and public investment in the crumbling British infrastructure, in housing, transport, and energy conservation...

...The only way out of the incomes policy trap is to convince key groups in the economy that they have a stake in keeping productivity up and wages down...

...By giving individual workers a greater stake in their company's success and giving specific encouragement to workers' cooperatives the twin causes of industrial democracy and industrial stability are enhanced...

...Like the Thatcherites and the Trotskyites, the SDP pledges itself to dissolve class differences and liberate individuals from oppressive forces...

...A mere nine months after the SDP's inception, the Cautious Economist hailed the Alliance as "Her Majesty's opposition" in a cover story...

...What many critics of industrial policy forget is that all Western democracies already have an industrial policy, if not in name then in fact...

...Scargill paints Thatcher as a fascist dictator...

...The unfortunate irony is that these divisions permitted the rise of Reagan and Thatcher in the first place...

...You want parents in the school system, patients in the health service, residents in the neighborhood, customers in both nationalized and private industry, to have as much say as possible...

...and the governments of right-wing Labourites Harold Wilson and James Callaghan from 1974 to 1979...

...Though the left wing of the Tory Party conceivably could enjoy a renaissance, the right wing of the Labour Party is being openly—and rudely—shunted aside by the far left...

...The measured tone of the Dimbleby Lecture belies its far-reaching impact...

...Jenkins did...

...Whatever their differences, both Thatcherites and Trotskyites draw comfort from class even as they seek the eradication of class...

...They also continued to ignore unemployment...

...The unsettling symmetries of British politics, then, took root in disturbing fashion...

...Jenkins' stirring manifesto for the radical center in Britain, the now-famous Dimbleby Lecture of 1979, appears significant only in retrospect...

...The polarized atmosphere of June 1983, with unilateral disarmers arrayed against anticommunists and the unemployed against inflation fighters, lent itself to dogmatic and ideological fervor...

...By October, the same Liberal candidate who had taken only 11 percent of the vote at the 1979 general election upped his share to a victorious 40 percent in a by-election at Croydon, helped by vigorous SDP campaigning...

...This is as much as they or any other estate of the realm can or should carry...

...The SDP and the Liberals recognize this, but also appreciate the need to sustain economic growth without refueling inflation...

...Though Labour politicians have done their best to pin the SDP with the label of imitation Tories, the Social Democrats would at least benefit in their dealings with big British unions from the fact that they represent the vested interests of neither capital nor the professions...

...The current miners' strike, which began in March, provides a case in point...

...You want the nation to be selfconfident and outward-looking, rather than insular, xenophobic, and suspicious...

...Right now Owen and his followers have to escape the label of "boring," one of the worst crimes in Britain...

...You are against unnecessary centralization and bureaucracy...

...But of course responsible approaches don't always make for political drama...

...This leads conscience-ridden members of the middle class to stick with the Conservatives in the hope that the benign paternalism of Disraeli, Harold Macmillan, and Edward Heath might overcome the coarse Thatcherites...

...Despite the Labour Party's long history, it has never managed to bring itself to support something along these lines, preferring the sham of nationalization...

...He won, and the furious computer prognostications spewed forth...

...With the Tories they want to free individual workers from the collectivist tyrannies of trade unions and individual entrepreneurs from undue restrictions...

...In the June 1983 election, the Tories captured 43 percent, Labour 28 percent, and the Alliance 26 percent, including almost a third of the union vote in addition to professionals and others who do not identify with the conventional class divisions...

...To a Tory, a Labour voter can never be correct...

...We need the innovating stimulus of the free market economy without either the unacceptable brutality of its untrammeled distribution of rewards or its indifference to unemployment," he says...

...So far, pretty mundane stuff, the kind of thing any reader of newspapers might say in reflecting on strife-torn, strike-ridden Britain...

...As long as those hostilities persist, they will not only defeat centrist initiatives but will, more ominously, produce frustration with the notion of moderation itself...

...isolationism—expressed most recently by Senator Sam Nunn's defeated amendment to scale down American troops in Western Europe...

...The Liberals and the SDP forged an electoral alliance, and suddenly the September polls showed 25 percent for the Conservatives, 31 percent for Labour, and 41 percent for the center-left Alliance...

...With that lofty bit of rhetoric, Jenkins declared his intention to start a political movement unbeholden to the deeply entrenched interests of the left and right...

...You use taxation for this purpose but not just to lop off rewards...

...In the next few months Thatcher remained preoccupied by her fights with the Tory wets while the Labour Party, apparently harboring a death wish, strayed to the left still further...

...The greater the discord, the less the combatants hanker after harmony...

...When he delivered it, the birth of the Social Democratic Party was 18 months away, and his speech attracted the ephemeral attention of the odd columnist but not much else...

...Moderation was no longer enough...

...The Alliance proposals were a model of rationality and equity...

...The result is a political dynamic reminiscent of Newton's third law of motion: each vision has yielded an equal and opposite revision...

...But Owen has just as strongly condemned Thatcher for her needless provocations of the miners in particular and the labor movement in general, for her lack of a coherent energy policy that might have satisfied the miners' grievances, for her failure to recognize the strike's consequences at the outset and her abrupt decision four months after it began to raise the stakes drastically, to the point where Scargill will be able to claim any settlement at all as a victory for his intransigence...

...In the United States as in Britain, the process is understandable, especially in view of the perverse delight Reagan and Thatcher seem to derive from bullying their foes...

...What was happening in Britain following a decade of failed middle-of-the-road policies was a reassertion of the class system...

...Foreign correspondents and observers tend to depict them as the party of moderation...

...David Owen, who took over from Jenkins as leader of the SDP after last year's June election, has rightly criticized Scargill's ugly tactics throughout the strike: the decision to tear the union apart by proceeding without a national vote...

...The emphasis on job creation had a thrift angle as well...

...The Conservative answer, in Britain as elsewhere, is to use severe unemployment as a tacit incomes policy...

...A leftist by experience and inclination, he announced his readiness to challenge the unions when their interests conflicted with the public good, just as he would continue to challenge the aristocrats and plutocrats who fought for narrow privileges...

...But political radicals...

...Margaret Thatcher reacted first by dismissing the miners as irrelevant and then, deciding that they were not so irrelevant after all, by describing them as "the enemy within"—who must be defeated the same way her government defeated "the enemy without" in the Falklands...

...Still, the defense of the Falklands now costs British taxpayers close to $2 million a day, and early hopes that Neil Kinnock might resuscitate his party have begun to fade...

...the third time around, he skipped the ballot and called out his members...

...The reflexive left-wing response is to pretend that the last 15 years did not exist...

...Gary Hart's unexpected successes may reflect these yearnings in the U.S...

...It may be that the Alliance was bound to have its comeuppance, or simply that the chance occurrence of the war interrupted a long-term trend...

...With the Labour Party they want to free individuals from the tyrannies of poverty and unemployment, perpetrated in the name of economic humbug...

...Given the urgency of the problem, the SDP hopes it has found the right doctor in David Owen...

...his open insults to other union leaders who have demurred from joining his selfrighteous, revolutionary crusade...

...Greater decentralization in the Labour movement would undercut the bosses who control the trade unions and clash with the ideological inclinations of the far left, which sees a sort of statist proletarian dictatorship as more in line with its elitist brand of socialism than genuine worker control...

...Yet many citizens continue to hunger for consensus rather than conflict and for fresh approaches to stale problems...

...He frankly faces the problem: Modern Britain, he says, "has been sluggish, uninventive and resistant to voluntary change, not merely economically but socially and politically as well...

...The popular Shirley Williams, minister of education in a previous Labour government and the person whom many thought would be Britain's first woman prime minister, stole one of the safest Tory seats in November's Crosby by-election...

...Within six weeks, Thatcher's firm handling of the crisis and the feverish support for the British task force ("Up Your Junta," screamed Rupert Murdoch's Sun) prompted the Tories to shoot up to 51 percent in the polls, with Labour dwindling to 25 percent and the Alliance, its identity still amorphous, falling to 22 percent...

...Looking to the power and money of the British trade unions to balance the intransigence of the left within the Labour Party would be egregious, according to Jenkins...

...Labour has doubts about both— NATO for reasons of anti-Americanism and the EEC for reasons of protectionism...

...Or he could strike out on his own and defy the grain of a nation he knew to be "sluggish" and "resistant to voluntary change...

...Still, the history of Britain is the history of getting it right—not before a lot of pain and mistakes, but just in time to avert disaster...

...The former president of the European Commission in Brussels, the bureaucrat's promised land...

...The obstacles appeared formidable...

...The Conservatives regard the Alliance as their most formidable threat, while Labour fears being replaced as the foremost party on the left...

...True to form, both prefer to reside in the country, away from London's bustle—Jenkins in St...

...At the same time, because most of the SDP's members are defectors from Labour, the party would have the advantage of understanding the trade union perspective without being hamstrung by union domination of its funds and votes...

...Equally worrisome, he was witnessing the ascendance of the Trotskyite and unilateralist left within his own Labour Party...

...They could hardly do worse...

...With both sides now committed to total annihilation of the adversary, the prospect of a realistic conciliation that would keep the industrial peace and strengthen the British economy grows dimmer by the day...

...The same difficulty applied to economic and industrial policy...

...At first not even the British, with their keen appreciation of eccentricity, could believe it...