British politics in the melting pot
The beginning of 1982 sees the most profound re-composition in British working class politics for half a century. The Labour Party has in the last year suffered a split of 25 of its members of Parliament to the newly-formed
Social Democratic Party, and is still deeply immersed in a prolonged fight between the right wing and the left around Tony Benn. All the old certainties of British political life are being broken up. While the Tory government becomes more and more unpopular and isolated, the Social Democratic Party has scored a number of startling electoral successes, at the expense of both the Conservative and Labour Parties. It is widely expected that the next British general election scheduled for 1984 will see three major parties in contention - Tory, Labour and the SDP in alliance with the Liberals - and that none of these parties will win an overall majority. Only a couple of years ago these events were unthinkable. British polities, and particularly working class polities has entered a completely new era.
economic crisis of British capitalism. Britain, the first country to experience an industrial revolution, has been in decline vis-a-vis its major imperialist rivals for almost a century. But the effects of this crisis were hidden for at least 50 years - first by Britain's role as the foremost imperialist nation, second by the long post-war capitalist boom. While Britain's industrial base was challenged by the stronger emerging industrial nations - and in the first place Germany and the United States — British capitalism was able to sustain itself because of the huge reserves of empire, and the consequent role of the City of London as the world's major trading, banking and commercial centre. But the British Empire was destroyed by two world wars. Then again, after the second world war, the long capitalist boom, in which Britain shared, hid Britain's decline. But at the end of the boom, Britain was weaker than all its major rivals. The recession of 1974-75 hit Britain particularly
The depth of the economic crisis has exhausted the reserves of classic
Keynsian, social welfare solutions. For thirty years after the second world war, the British political scene was dominated by a 'centre' consensus. Both major parties Conservative and Labour were led by 'moderate' political leaders whose consensus revolved around agreement on limited nationalisation, state intervention in the economy, the 'welfare state', the primacy of parliamentary democracy and the British constitution
'civilised' British values. But this consensus began to lose its credibility in the 1960s. For the workers movement the experience of the 1964-70 Labour government was a profound watershed. Far from attempting to implement socialist policies, Wilson's government departed the scene in 1970 as an ig pe,
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British politics in the melting pot
EDITORIAL
The recomposition of British politics is above all hard.
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British politics in the melting pot 15 nominious failure, having attempted to impose on the trade unions antistrike legislation - 'In Place of Strife'. This experience, together with the anti-working class attacks of the 1970-74 Tory government, led to the emergence of a new political trend in social democracy - the left social democracy of Tony Benn. But for the moment, despite its influence in shaping the 1974 election manifesto of the Labour Party, Bennism remained a minority current. : 7-₴ Even more cataclysmic for the working class movement was the experience of the Wilson-Callaghan government of 1974-79. This government came to power in the wake of the defeat of Heath's conservative government by mass industrial action (the miners strikes of 1972 and 1974). It immediately proceeded to impose the most severe austerity measures. Finance minister Denis Healey achieved notoriety in his attempts to cut social expenditure and deflate the economy - at the behest of the International Monetary Fund. This situation of mounting unemployment and increasingly severe government policies resulted in a profound downturn in the British class struggle. The spontaneous militancy of 1968-74 ran out of steam faced with a Labour government implementing austerity measures. The Labour government imposed its 'social contract' on the unions, which led to an eight per cent fall in real living standards in one year. The Labour government fell when its wages policy was challenged during the 'winter of discontent' of 1978-79.
The new shape of British politics is the result of the failure of both Conservative and Labour governments to make any significant impact on that crisis. The result is the radical social democratic reformism of Benn in the working class, and the new dominance of Thatcherism in the Tory party. Whereas the Thatcherite Tories have implemented many policies which are harmful to the sections of the British bourgeoisie based on manufacturing capital, nonetheless they have a perfectly coherent set of views on how to solve the crisis. First they have embarked on a policy of deflation, worsening the economic crisis. This they hope will intensify competition between firms, driving the less efficient out of business and forcing a re-organisation of methods of work. In addition, they hoped unemployment would force down living standards and weaken trade union organisation. The restructuring of British capitalism would also include the re-privatisation of the more profitable sectors of nationalised industry, and a wholesale assault on the welfare state. This set of measures of course is a complete break with the Keynsian consensus and a return to neo-classical economic views. In theory, it should lead to a recovery on the basis of a defeated and demoralised labour force. The workers would pay the cost of recovery from the crisis. The problem is that Thatcherism in practice has failed. Despite the fact that trade union strength has fallen by one million and the workers have been forced onto the defensive - suffering a series of important local defeats — the trade unions are not thoroughly defeated. In many sectors, considerable combativity still exists; the government is still forced to retreat in the face of threats by stronger sections of workers. But worse, the economic crisis has now become so catastrophic that it is beginning to hit the stronger more profitable sectors of British industry. Despite the continued strength of the banking and finance sector, fuelled by high interest rates, manufacturing capital is losing confidence in Thatcher rapidly, as profits tumble. This in turn has engendered the beginnings of the process of dissent and rebellion
16 International Marxist Review inside the Conservative Party itself, led by the so-called 'wets' like Gilmour, St-John Stevas and former Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath.
The political response inside the bourgeoisie to the apparent failure of Thatcherism is to begin to reject the politics of the radical right, and to yearn for the moderate politics of yester-year. It is this, together with the rise of the militant left inside the Labour Party, which has created the political backdrop for the emergence of the Social Democratic Party. As the Labour Party has moved to the left, there has been a furious outery from the bourgeoisie and from the labour bureaucracy. Large sections of the ruling class have concluded that temporarily at least the Labour Party is no longer a 'safe' alternative government — even a right wing Labour government would be under the pressure of the Bennite base both in the trade unions and the local Labour Parties. Thus the bourgeoisie, using the mechanism of a section of Labour's members of Parliament, has engineered a split in the party.
Since its formation, the Social Democratic Party has scored remarkable successes. In opinion polls it has consistently scored between 25 and 40 per cent, leading the other two main parties. It has won over 100 local council seats, as well as scoring a remarkable election victory in the Crosby by-election. Nonetheless, the popular appeal of the SDP is based on the media promotion of this party and its 'newness' - its clean hands in relation to the record of the other parties. In fact there is nothing very new about the SDP. It represents a ransacking of the last thirty years of British political history in the search for policies which will constitute an alternative to Bennism and Thatcherism. Naturally, the only ideas which the SDP has actually found are the ideas of the Keynsian social welfare consensus. These are the ideas of British capitalism in a period of boom, rather than the ideas of British capitalism in its period of most acute crisis. Therefore these ideas from the past are doomed to failure if an attempt is made to implement them in an SDP/Liberal government, or a new coalition government which constructs a 'national unity' around the SPD/Liberals together with the Labour right and the Tory left. But the historical bankruptcy of the SDP's ideas does not mean that they cannot garner immense support between now and the next election.
The coming to power of a government based on the SDP would almost certainly involve a major change in the British electoral system to introduce proportional representation. This would make it much more difficult for either Labour or the Tories to form a government on their own in future, opening up a long period of coalition governments, with potentially disastrous consequences for the Conservative Party in particular. Such a move would amount to a decisive attempt by the bourgeoisie to break with the old two-party system which has served them so well since the second world war.
The rise of the SDP has shaken the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy to the core. Faced with the possibility that the SDP could emerge as strong as the other major parties at the 1984 general election, the Labour bureaucracy has decided that it must do everything possible to prevent the left-right conflict inside the party. This has taken the form of a dual strategy — the launching of a savage witch hunt against the Bennites and far left inside the party, together with appeals for 'unity'. The object of the ex-
British politics in the melting pot 17 ercise is to blame Tony Benn and the for the decline in Labour's opinion-poll showing, and to demand that the left cease their struggle for democracy and socialist policies inside the party. This demagogic campaign will doubtless have a certain resonance. Even left-wing militants inside the Labour Party and the trade unions see the 1984 general election as the major opportunity to get rid of the hated Thatcher government. Pressure will build up on the leadership of the Labour left to maintain a facade of 'unity' until after the election.
For the left to go along with this ploy would amount to a major tactical error. If Labour goes into the next election with pro-capitalist policies indistinguishable from the SDP itself, then it will almost certainly lose votes massively. The only way to counter the SDP is to challenge its claim to be a 'new alternative' and to generate a crusade inside the workers movement around a programme of anti-capitalist measures to solve the crisis in the interests of the workers. But whether or not the campaign to unify the party around right wing policies is successful, Labour's crisis will continue. The Labour Party is facing an historical crisis, because of the inability of social democracy to provide answers to capitalism's crisis. Reformism can no longer deliver the goods. In government, or outside government, the British Labour Party has embarked on a long period of recomposition and crisis which will not be solved by short-term tricks or quick manoeuvres by the bureaucracy.
Britain is virtually unique among major countries in having a single workers party to which the trade unions are affiliated. This makes the stakes involved in this conflict enormous. The trend which has been set in train involves the possibility of further splits to the right if the Bennites win control of the party, and the formation of a 'new' Labour Party of a left social democratic character. The result of this process of recomposition will depend on the ability of revolutionary Marxists to intervene in the crisis of British reformism at all levels, both in the unions and the Labour Party. In the 1980s there will be tens of thousands of workers who will understand the language of our programme. It is an historic opportunity for British socialism. IMP Spring 82 _