Wednesday 1 July 1981

BREAKING MOULDS

Solidarity leader, summer 1981

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.