Ninety-eighty-one has undoubtedly witnessed some dramatic
changes on the British party-political scene. On one hand, the Conservative party
has shown itself more openly divided than at any time since the war, and on the
other, the long-running feud between the right and left of the Labour party has
finally resulted in a significant right-wing faction abandoning Labour to form a
new party which, in alliance with the Liberals, has been making spectacular
advances in the opinion polls.
It is doubtful that all this will have any radical
effect on the type of economic policies we can expect to suffer for the next
decade. The Labour Party, the SDP-Liberal Alliance and the Tory “wets” are all committed
to some form of Keynesian fiscal expansion backed up by wage controls , and although
there exist a number of disagreements on the precise form such a policy should take
(such as the differences over the EEC, statutory incomes control , nationalisation
and protectionism) , we can almost certainly look forward to the prospect of a turn
to revitalised versions of the sorts of programmes unsuccessfully pursued by governments
in the 1970s, whoever takes power after the next general election.
In an important sense, therefore, the realignment of British
party politics is little more than cosmetic: on the assumption that the present
Conservative government either performs a U-turn or loses office (through an
electoral defeat or, improbably, as a result of parliamentary defections), the
economic policy die seems well and truly cast. How successful this “new
Keynesianism” will be is, of course, another question. There are good reasons
to doubt that one of its variants will solve the problems of capitalism. In
particular, much depends on the response of the working class to new
conditions. What is important here, however, is the similarity of the so-called
alternatives put forward by the various parties that stand a chance of succeeding
the present Tory government.
Nevertheless, to dismiss the changes on the party-political front
simply as a superficial gloss on what is fundamentally a growing consensus
among the potential managers of capitalism would be mistaken.
The realignment of British politics might not reflect any significant
breaking of the mould in policy terms, but it most certainly does stem from deeply
important changes in the relationship between the ways people perceive their
positions in the class structure and the party political preferences they
express in elections.
Since the war, people who consider themselves as working-class
have identified less and less with “their” Labour party at election time. At the
same time those who see themselves as middle-class have weakened in their allegiance
to the Conservatives. These tendencies have resulted in the steady decline of electoral
support for the Conservative and Labour parties: the percentage of the electorate
who voted Labour or Conservative fell from 80 per cent in 1951 to only 60 per
cent in 1979, partly because of a long-term growth in abstention (which in fact
had reached its zenith in October 1974) and partly because of an increase in the
percentage of voters backing minor parties.
Simultaneously, there has been a change in the social composition
of party membership, particularly that of the Labour party at constituency level.
The picture of a Labour party composed of polytechnic lecturers so often put before
us by the media is a caricature, but the trend towards an activist grass roots
increasingly dominated by those popular usage would define as “middle-class" is undeniable.
This trend is at once both instrumental in perpetuating the decline
of identification with Labour on the part of those who consider themselves
working-class and the result of such a decline. What is important here,
however, is not the minute workings of the embourgeoisement
process going on in local Labour parties but the very fact that it is
happening. Labour, long since having ceased to be for the working class, is now
less and less of it.
Some people have yet to realise this: one thinks at once of
those sincere souls who, while critical of Labour’s programme and organisation,
nevertheless join up “to talk to the workers”, oblivious to the fact that the status
of the Labour Party as a "mass party” has for a long time been extremely questionable.
Others are, however, much shrewder. It is no coincidence that the academics who
first charted the development of a disjunction between the ways people saw themselves
in class terms, and the way they participated in party politics as voters or activists,
are now advising the embryo Social Democratic party. For the SDP is essentially
the attempt of a temporarily defeated political elite to exploit the weakening
identification of class and party in the collective political consciousness for
the sake of gaining power.
What is more, the “Gang of Four” played their hand at a
singularly opportune moment. By splitting from Labour when it was in opposition
to the most unpopular Tory government of modern times, the Social Democrats can
now count not only upon their apparent novelty, their democratic rhetoric and the
disaffection of many Labour voters, but also on a cadre of ex-Conservative-voting
“political virgins”. In alliance with the Liberals, the SDP stand a fair chance
of at least holding the balance of power in parliament by 1984.
Very poor scan not checked against original.
