THE SPECTATOR
ALLIANCE: WIN BY LOSING
A. 11 who wish the Alliance success in this election should hope that the Tories will win an overall majority. An overall majority for the Alliance is not merely Improbable, but if attained would, in all but the shortest term, do the Alliance serious harm. The Alliance is not ready for government. To some extent, no opposi- tion party ever is. But in the case of the Alliance, victory on 11 June would be more than usually premature. It would be the result of a by-election type of boom in Alliance support repeated on a national scale. Even at its present level, somewhere in the 20 to 30 per cent range, Alliance support is `softer' than that of the other two main parties. Were Alliance support to increase to the level needed to gain a Commons majority, it would be less dur- able still. For a brief honeymoon it would be thought that a revolution had occurred, and there would be extravagant expecta- tions of all that the Alliance government was going to achieve. But when it was discovered that to solve intractable prob- lems, for example in the inner cities, was after all going to take years of effort, with no promise even of eventual success, the bubble of popular support would burst. The Alliance would be flung back below its present level. It would then be further than ever from the goal to which it should aspire, namely to push Labour aside and become the main party of the centre-left.
But if those who hold this aspiration for the Alliance should hope that it is denied an overall majority, why should they also wish to deprive it of a position of decisive influence, holding the balance of power? In this instance, there is little doubt, not only that the coalition partners, whoever they were, would fall out, but that the party of the centre which had chosen to put in either the Conservatives or Labour would be blamed. The Liberals did not benefit electorally from the Lib-Lab pact. Nor would the Alliance benefit from a pact after the next election. Instead, it would be subjected to such severe internal strains that it would probably split in two. There would come a difficult moment at which either the Liberal MPs or the Social Democrats, or a majority of either group, would decide that the actions of the Gov- ernment were intolerable. They could no longer support a government which so abandoned liberalism, or social democra- cy, as they understood it. Once again, the process of replacing the Labour Party would have received an immense setback. While, however, the malign consequ- ences which could be expected to flow from excessive Alliance success are con- siderable, those which would flow from Labour success are greater. Few political commentators think that Labour will gain an overall majority. But the Party will be able to claim a degree of some success if it simply manages to keep ahead of the Alliance in terms of votes cast. If on that count Labour falls into third place, its prospects will indeed appear dire. It may well still have more MPs than the Alliance, but its hopes of power will be fainter than ever — provided there is not a hung Parliament. In the latter event, not only will there be scope for forming a coalition government with the Alliance, or with sympathetic elements within it; there will also be the likelihood of a^second election in the near future. But third place without the comfort of such possibilities would powerfully concentrate the minds of such clever, in many ways admirable and in political terms still young men as Mr John Smith and Mr Bryan Gould. It is hard to imagine that many Labour MPs who are neither very thick nor very left-wing would see much point in struggling on in a party with virtually no hope of ever entering government again.
These are the circumstances which would most favour a realignment of the Left in Britain. With luck, there would emerge a large social-democratic party which would not be devoted to undoing the achievements of the Thatcher years, but to building upon them. To the left of that, a communist rump would emerge. All these calculations may seem danger- ously elaborate, but they do not imply any very complicated or perverse behaviour on the part of voters. Voters who accept the above view of the election should vote to elect Conservative MPs, except in seats where the real fight is between the Labour and Alliance candidates and the Tory has no serious chance of winning.
Here they should vote tactically for the Alliance. These seats will include some already held by the Alliance, such as Glasgow Hillhead and Greenwich, and some which the Alliance is trying to wrest from Labour, such as Islington South. We shall publish a full list before polling day. The main need of the Alliance may be to win more votes than Labour, but its future development will naturally be assisted if as many good Alliance MPs are returned as is consistent with not holding the balance of power.
This analysis will seem intolerably patro- nising to some members of the Alliance. They will see no need to take advice from a paper which hopes that Mrs Thatcher is going to be returned for a third time. They will regard themselves as part of the `natural majority' against Thatcherism, bound to look with suspicion on the other side. It appears to us that they are rather a part of the natural majority against the Labour Party, and that the Labour Party is in terminal decline. It will perhaps be years before we discover which of these attitudes is nearer the truth, but there can be little doubt that at present, the Right still holds the intellectual initiative. Mrs Thatcher better deserves the epithet 'radical' than Mr Kinnock does; and in Alliance circles, if not in truly Tory ones, 'radical' is the highest term of praise.
Many leaders of the Alliance would in private admit that their best interest will be served by a Tory overall majority, pro- vided they themselves come second in terms of votes. They will have broken away from the old Liberal pattern of following a successful general election performance by a disappointing one next time. The trend in their support will still be upwards, and the opportunity of winning social democratic converts from Labour much greater. But they point out one danger: that the Tories in government will steal some of the best of their policies. The Tories have already borrowed wholesale, and without ac- knowledgment, from the SDP in the field of trade union reform. With their proposal to allow council tenants to opt out of local authority management in favour of housing associations, they have taken over an idea by which the Liberals set much store. Most notably, the Tories have stolen the idea of all the opposition parties that one way of solving problems is for the state to spend more money. In their party political broad- cast earlier this week, they boasted of spending £19 billion a year more now in real terms than was being spent in 1979. That is the opposite of their original intention. Perhaps, after all, Mrs Thatcher is not so 'radical' as she pretends. Perhaps she is a closet social democrat.
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