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that this system was particularly biased against the new Liberal–
Social Democratic Alliance. British voting is traditionally class
based. But in Britain, geography is also class based. The inner cities
(=
manual workers
=
Labor) are differentiated from suburbia
(=
white-collar workers
=
Conservative). Blue-collar workers are a
minority nationwide, but a majority in the north. These simple facts
of geography give the Labor and Conservative parties strongholds–
the equivalents of Massachusetts for the Democrats-that are
beyond storming. But the Social Democrats have no such strong–
holds. It has been calculated by psephologists at Nuffield College,
Oxford, that if each party polled one-third of the nationwide vote in
the next general election, Labor would win the most seats, the Con–
servatives would come in second, and the Liberal-Social Demo–
cratic Alliance would win fewer than fifty of the 635 Commons seats .
And the proof of the psephologists' pudding came in the May local
elections, where the alliance polled twenty-five percent of the
national vote-but only a little over five percent of the seats.
Moreover, as the new party has gone on, it has become clear
that its ideology is by no means as appealing as may at first blush
have seemed likely.
It
is moderate (good, in British political terms);
but it is also pro-European (bad, in British terms); and it is per–
ceived as too liberal on what Scammon and Wattenburg have chris–
tened the "social issues" oflaw and order and race (in British terms,
very bad).
The events of the fall and winter show the variability of British
-as of all-politics. The Tory government has benefited from the
war in the Falklands, though it is not clear how much of the fervor
will last. The Foot leadership in the Labor Party, with the reluctant
support of the trade unions, has maintained its power; Tony Benn
has gone off to sulk. And the luster of the Social Democrats has
diminished. Most puzzling of all, though unemployment has
reached the fourteen-percent mark, there has been little overt action
by the unemployed, though one suspects that the continuation of
high unemployment will benefit the Labor Party, not the new
alliance.
Whatever the outcomes, what is certain is the survival in some
form of a Labor Party, and I shall close with a few remarks on its
nature. It should be said clearly that it will not be a Trotskyist party.
A great deal of attention in Britain has focused on the efforts of the
party leadership to expel the Trotskyite Militant tendency, which has
practiced the "entryist" tactics of attempting to infiltrate the Labor
Party and then use it for revolutionary ends. But whether it succeeds
