Gang warfare
The Gang of Three,enlarged,with the arrival back on these shores of Mr Roy Jenkins, into the Gang of Four, has now attracted to its members, its ideals, its plots and its ambitions another nine desperadoes fleeing from, the tyranny of organised labour, the block vote, Mr Benn, the militant tendency, Trotskyist entryism, marxism, socialism, pacifism, unilateral disarmamentism, antiAmericanism, a nti-Europeanism, anti-monetarism, anticapitalism and whatever else contributes from time to time towards the composition and the direction of what Mr Clive Jenkins last Saturday actually called 'This Great Movement of Ours.' We now have a Gang of Thirteen, 11 Labour MPs plus Mr Jenkins and Mrs Shirley Williams. The Liberal Party has 11 MPs including Jo Grimond, who sensibly suggests elsewhere iii these pages that there is nothing irreconcileable between the Gang of Thirteen, the Liberal Eleven and Mr David Steel's Ten Points. To add to the stew, there are about a dozen big unions whose size matters and whose leaders are now at odds with each other, with their members and with the party.
Against these gangs (to put the matter into some sort of perspective) there are a motley crew of 11 Ulstermen, two Welsh and two Scottish nationalists, the Speaker, and a couple of very heavy mobs indeed: the Tory Gang of 339, and the Labour Gang of 268. If we remove from the Labour Gang the 11 MPs in the Gang of Thirteen, we are still left with a pretty substantial mob of 257. It is the clear anticipation of the Gang of Four/Thirteen that, come the day after the next election, an entirely different disposition of forces will have emerged. They look towards a time when something like 60 or more Labour MPs will have deserted and split the Labour vote, and when the blandishments of the centre will have lost to Joint Liberal/Social Democrat candidates perhaps a dozen Tory seats. The arithmetic is difficult; hut the Tory mob looks likely, on balance, to increase its numbers. Since it already has a comfortable majority, it would seem as if the Gang of Four/Thirteen is looking towards the election after next to obtain the hope of power. , The Gangsters ought to be able to cobble together with the Liberals not only some kind of electoral understanding but also a common platform which will be attractive to a substantial section of the commUnity. Public opinion polls constantly remind us of a yearning towards the centre, of disillusionthent with and disaffection towards the antago nistic and polarising two-party system, of a wish that party politics and party politicians would get out of the way, and it is to these kinds of public sentiment that the Gang of Four's so-called Limehouse Declaration addressed itself, just as the Liberal party has been addressing itself for all these years. No doubt Mrs Williams, Mr Jenkins, Dr Owen and Mr Rodgers will be able to add something to the Liberal party's appeal, and to take something away from the Labour party's support. They may bring about a re-alignment of the left, so that the left more corresponds with public opinion than it does at present. But how they will bring about a fundamental re-alignment of British politics is not at all clear. Their activity seems altogether more likely to entrench the Tories in their present power: which is no kind of re-alignment at all.
It is easy therefore to sympathise with Labour's right-wing gangsters as they ponder whether and when to cut loose, for they cannot but see the probable outcome of their endeavours to be not power for themselves and their ideas, which is what they want, but power for Mrs Thatcher and her ideas, which is what they dislike almost as much as they dislike Mr Benn and his ideas. In the long run, if they manage first to destroy the Labour party as an alternative government and an effective opposition, they may be able to replace it and to challenge the Tories. It is a long and difficult haul they have embarked upon.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the wiser and less onerous path would have been to seek power through the party to which they already belong. The unions may well shunt themselves off their present left-wing tracks, and it is far fromunlikely that at about the time in early summer when the Gang of Thirteen finally plucks up , courage and takes flight the trade union mobsters will have begun moving in to sort the party out. If the 13 gangsters are tit quit,then from their point of view, the sooner they do it the better. To hang on until May or June suggests not resolution in the face of their enemy but rather irresolution in the face of their friends. These timorous gangsters look very much like becoming the victims of the gang warfare they have imprudently embarked upon, and Mrs Thatcher the happy beneficiary.
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