Deep Sproat
To anyone familiar with the recent mood of most Moderate Labour MPs, the hollowest laugh of the week Was provided on Tuesday morning by Mr David Marquand. 'Are you disenchanted with the Labour Party ?', asked a radio interviewer. 'Oh no,' replied the retiring MP for Ashfield, as he rushed off with a sigh of relief to join Roy Jenkins amid the fleshpots of Brussels. On the same morning the headlines were full of Mr Ian Sproat's claim that ten named Labour MPs now held views 'totally alien to the democratic Labour tradition' and had 'tricked decent Labour supporters' into supporting their intention to 'turn Britain into the equivalent of a totalitarian East European state.'
Mr Sproat's seemingly melodramatic charges have only brought out into the open what has for months been a talking point at Westminster. Indeed, at a recent Private lunch, a prominent Labour backbencher went even further, claiming that 'at least twenty or thirty' of his colleagues have no time for parliamentary democracy at all 'It's not the Tribune group and the Norman Atkinsons you have to worry about,' he said, 'they are almost conservative in their attitude to Parliament. But there is now a group on the extreme left who are basically Trotskyites, and hold Parliament in contempt.'
'What is even more worrying,' the same man went on, is the Parliamentary Labour Party's likely composition in the future.' He had recently analysed the official list of prospective Labour candidates, which shows their Most frequent occupation to be that of 'polytechnic lecturer,' the majority, as he put it, 'the class of 1968, complete products of trendy late 'sixties Marxism.'
Is a fundamental change taking place in the character and balance of the Parliamentary Labour Party ? Recent evidence is disquieting. It was reported this week, for instance, that no less than six London Labour MPs (all moderates) now face dismissal by local party activists before the next election. Coupled with the almost lemming-like rush of men like Jenkins and Marquand to leave politics of their own accord (David Wood observed in Monday's Times that, of the seventeen Labour MPs who have so far announced their retirement at the next election, all but three are moderates or `Gaitskellites), we may before long be faced with the possibility of a PLP in which, for the first time in its history, the moderates may actually be in a minority.
Certainly the gulf between the bland (and still to most voters reassuring) presence of Mr Callaghan, talking in his white tie to City businessmen about the need for profit in private industry, and the reality of what is happening on the back benches behind him is becoming wider almost day by day. The question which remains is: How long will it be before the voters realise the 'switch sell' that is taking place? It becomes increasingly likely that, sooner or later, only a desperate gesture of unaccustomed courage by the 'splitters' (those right-wing Labour MPs who now talk freely in private about the eventual need for a complete party split) can alert the country to the full danger of what is going on.
