Yes, it does sound somewhere on the way to "Trotskyist parliamentary candidates", even if it is nowhere near "anarchist parties". But both of those also exist.
At least the new registered supporter status, which it looks practically certain that David Owen intends to adopt, now offers a happy home to those for whom the early 1980s Left was too much, but New Labour was too little, or else too much of something equally undesirable. Under Ed Miliband, Labour is once again the party that it was before ... well, before it all kicked off, really.
Labour could have had Owen's endorsement at the General Election of 1992, when a tiny number of votes would have delivered a different result. But Labour would not stand down its candidates against John Cartwright and Rosie Barnes, also by then Independent Social Democrats.
Anyone who knew that party from the inside, as Owen and Cartwright certainly did, could not have been remotely surprised at that refusal. Yet, since Nick Raynsford in particular would undoubtedly have found his way back into Parliament and then into office by another route, it does seem in hindsight as if that would have been a very small price to have paid. But we all know about hindsight.
So, who next?
The small remaining SDP, with its council seats in Bridlington and Aberavon? One would hope that supporter status might be open to anyone who neither was, nor adhered to, any anti-Labour candidate for the House of Commons in Great Britain, thereby harnessing a wide variety of forces to Labour's right and left.
And in the House of Lords, alongside Owen, not only the spiritual leader of us Old Labour High Tories, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, but also the original Independent Social Democrat, Dick Taverne? The Keynesian master, balanced migration advocate, and opponent of the Kosovo War, Robert Skidelsky? The last of the Chocolate Soldiers and of the Jenkins entourage, Matthew Oakeshott? Even Bill Rodgers?
Shall I be becoming a registered supporter? I doubt that they would have me, it would depend on precisely what restrictions it entailed accepting, and in any case I am already a voter in a Labour Leadership or Deputy Leadership Election. Assuming the latter before the Collins reforms have had the time to come into effect, I shall be a voter in it several times over.
Led by the late Phyllis Stedman, there were initially 24 SDP Peers who refused to join the Lib Dems. It would be interesting to know how many of them were still alive.
ReplyDeleteIt would.
ReplyDeleteAnd it has always struck me as sad that George Cunningham, the last former MP still to give the SDP as his party on the list of those holding House of Commons passes, has never been ennobled.
He was one of the most considerable of backbenchers, he nearly held his seat in 1983, and, uniquely, he came close to regaining it in 1987.