LONDON-The map of British politics is rapidly changing. Workers' resistance to austerity, particularly the victory of the miners against pit closures in February, has critically weakened the Thatcher gov. ernment.
A new Social Democratic Party (SDP) was formed on March 26 with the declared aim of providing "a stable framework" for industry and commerce. The Labour Party has shifted to the left, a shift reflected in the election of Michael Foot as its leader.
Those who fail to realize the significance of these events will surely lose their way. For, at long last, the political crisis in Britain has started to correspond to the depth of the social and economic crisis.
Nowhere is this increased rate of political change more evident than in the Labour Party. The extent of the victories won by the left of the party has produced a frenzied reaction from the bourgeois press, which has singled out Tony Benn as the author of these triumphs.
Benn was a cabinet minister in the two Labour governments led first by Harold Wilson and then by Jim Callaghan between 1974 and 1979. These governments presided over a tripling of unemployment, large cuts in welfare spending, and the sharpest reduction of living standards in the twentieth century.
Yet the circumstances under which the first Labour government in 1974 came to power were auspicious ones: the fall of the Heath government at the hands of the miners and the election of the Wilson government on the most left-wing manifesto adopted by the Labour Party since the Second World War.
'Alternative Economic Strategy'
It was the desertion of this manifesto which formed the basis for Benn's critique of the experience of 1974-79. The manifesto itself was a program for the institutional reform of British capitalism.
Its central features were the creation of a body, the National Enterprise Board, to acquire important sections of industry for the state and the conclusion of planning agreements with the private sector. This was combined with a wide-ranging program of public expenditure combined with import controls and a voluntary incomes policy to curb the inflationary tendencies of such a program.
This program, dubbed in its essentials the "alternative economic strategy,
" has since been further elaborated and now forms the basis for the policy of both the Labour Party and the Trades Union Conabst Challend* NO MESSES CRUISE