1981 And All That

This weekend sees the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the SDP. That foundation was premature. Those who had determined upon it ought to have waited until the new Electoral College had given the Deputy Leadership to Tony Benn, casting their own votes in the MPs’ section to that end. Benn as Deputy Leader would have made it unanswerable that the Labour Party that they had joined no longer existed. A new party would have taken with it half or more of Labour MPs, most Labour Peers, huge numbers of Councillors, great tracts of the activist base, and a good many unions. At least one, and possibly both, of the two former Labour Prime Ministers then alive would have joined it.

But instead, although the Labour Right’s internal differences over incomes policy and over devolution were, up to a point, carried over into the SDP, its diversity over Europe hardly was. Almost all the Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth defenders of national sovereignty remained in the Labour Party (those who were not Tories), as did almost all of the right-wing Labour MPs who were not easily young enough to start again, or who had any real roots in local government or the unions, or who could not have been certain of making at least as much money if they had lost their seats as if they had kept them. The new party’s character was thus fixed from the start: a very readily identifiable post-War type that was still relatively young in 1981, had few or no roots in wider civil society, and was on the up economically. The 1980s were to be those people’s decade.

Apparently unable to see that the trade unions were where the need for a broad-based, sane opposition to Thatcherism was greatest, the SDP was hysterically hostile to them, and instead made itself dependent on a single donor, later made a Minister by Tony Blair without the rate for the job. It betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe. It betrayed both Christian Socialism and, contrary to what is usually asserted, Gaitskellism over nuclear weapons. It adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins. It adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams. And it carried over her sense of guilt at not having resigned over past Labour attempts to control immigration. Today, both the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat components of the Coalition are replete with its former members, and David Cameron’s court is stuffed full of them as advisors and general hangers-on. But read the Limehouse Declaration, and see if you can spot anything remotely redolent of the Coalition’s programme.

David Owen is highly critical of the Liberal Democrats for going along with the dismantlement of the NHS. But he oddly declines to mention that Andrew Lansley, who was far better in Opposition, started out in the SDP. Owen also suggests that Ed Miliband seek a multi-option referendum including STV, and speaks very highly of Miliband generally, rightly commending him for moving away from the worst of New Labour’s assaults on civil liberties, and rightly urging him “to identify more with public concern about greater European integration”. However, he need not worry about “flirting with membership of the eurozone”, since it was in fact the Labour victory in 1997 that put an end to any such flirtation, while actual British accession has always been economically and politically impossible. It is interesting to consider Owen’s claim that there would have been a hung Parliament in 1992 if the Alliance had still existed. But when he points out that there were and are four parties in Scotland and four in Wales, he neglects to mention that each situation was and is an awful squeeze even without a fifth element, and that that will always remain the case without electoral reform.

The last thing that needed to be said against Bennites and Trotskyists on one side, and against the forces around Margaret Thatcher on the other, was that “We want more, not less, radical change in our society”. “More decentralisation” disappeared down the blind alley of Scottish and Welsh devolution instead of issuing in the vigorous defence of the municipal order, and indeed of Parliament against the Executive, the judiciary, Brussels, Washington, and global capital; in any case, decentralisation is not the same thing as subsidiarity, which requires decision-making at the lowest practicable level, not at the lowest conceivable. Minor parties have put environmentalism, Scottish separatism and the Welsh language on the agenda. But the SDP’s subscription to European federalism (most un-Gaitskellite, and no longer Owen’s view) and to Liberal constitutional agenda barely distinguishable from those of Tony Benn, together with its scorn for the unions and its weak links to local government, so alienated much of its potential base that the party was never able to gain the same prominence for “a healthy public sector and healthy private sector, without frequent frontier changes”, nor perhaps for “competitive public enterprise”, nor certainly for “co-operative ventures and profit-sharing”. What a shame. What a waste.

Yet the need has never been greater for a party of those whose priorities include the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. A party for those social democrats who were alienated from Labour by the rise within it of forces inimical to Bevan’s eschewal of class conflict in favour of “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”. People whose views on certain issues have, if anything, returned to the Gaitskellite tradition during the intervening decades.

Where is that party? Roll on electoral reform.