DAVID LIPSEY
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or not is likely to prove beside the point. In a few local parties the
Trotskyites are a majority, but only where the constituencies have
become badly run down over the years. Though Militants have pro–
vided half a dozen parliamentary candidates, only one or two have
had, on any realistic assessment, any prospect of being elected.
At the moment (winter, 1982) the Center-Right leadership of the
party (Foot, Shore, Hattersley et al.) are in control largely because
of the support of the trade unions. The problem is in the constitu–
ency parties where the local activists, reinforced by a strong neutral–
ist sentiment, tend to be strongly "left." And these local parties are
exercising strong voice over the selection-and reselection-of
candidates.
As for the Labor Party that will remain, its active members will
be overwhelmingly middle class-which will not stop them from
using the rhetoric of class war. With most of them coming from the
public sector, they will be motivated by a combination of idealism
and guilt at how comfortable they are compared with their generally
working-class parents. Their policies will be vaguely dotty, owing
much to the residue of the student generation of 1968: a blend of
Marx and Gramsci and Roszak and Marcuse, with a touch of an
idealized version of Fidel Castro. But the continuing institutional
link with the trade unions will prevent them from running the party
purely as an intellectual debating society.
How such a party will fare electorally depends more on the eco–
nomic context than on its own internal composition and rhetoric .
Reality and responsibility exert a logic of their own.
If,
by some
chance, a new Labor government comes into power at the next elec–
tion, the need to deal with the problems of stimulating growth in
order to pay for an extended public sector may lead it to adopt the
ideas of the "siege economy" proposed by a group of Cambridge
economists, and to exercise strong controls-but it would have to be
that of the unions as well.
If,
as it now appears, it is more likely that
a Tory government will be returned, the Labor Party will slip more
and more into the hands of the Left, and a deeper polarization of the
British polity may eventuate.
If
so, and if reforms in the electoral
system can take place, the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance may
be the eventual inheritor of such a debacle. For, as in most Western
countries, the electorate tends to the center, even if the parties often
do not . But whether the Social Democrats have the staying power
remains to be seen-a conclusion that invariably ends all political
letters .
