Born again social democrats
John Horain
It seems to have become the accepted view that the only difference between the social democrats who are about to leave the Labour Party and those who remain is one Of political strategy. Those who remain are prepared for the long haul; they are willing to hang in with Hattersley. Those who leave are impatient and rash, and believe there is a chance of an appeal to the electorate over the heads of the old party machines. Entryism can be exorcised by exitism. The truth is rather different. It is that those who are leaving are prepared to admit that social democracy as practised in the Labour Party has failed and badly needs rethinking, while those staying believe in the essential correctness of the old model.
That is why one of the more curious aspects of the whole affair has been a rather sharp little side debate over the loyalty of the Limehouse Four and their supporters to Croslandism. Tony Crosland was after all the social democrat personified, its theologian and its saint, and the charge has been hurled at all of us that we long ago forsook the master. Did he not argue against cuts in the great financial crisis of 1976? And did not people like Edmund Dell and Bill Rodgers argue for cuts? That shows that our hearts were not in the right places even then. And Crosland, it is argued, would never have left the party. And all this is true. Crosland would not have left the party, in my view, and someone like, say, Roy Hattersley can Claim with justice that he is in the mainstream of Croslandism. To that extent the charge made by those who are staying is entirely accurate. However, it misses one important point: Tony Crosland was wrong. To be a little fairer — for Crosland's intellectual achievement in the field of Political writing was greater than anyone else's since the war — he was not completely right. His mistake, strange for an economist, and one who always wanted to be Chancellor, was to fail to offer a model for conornic growth. There is virtually nothing in The Future of Socialism about wealth creation, because Tony assumed that the problem had been solved. Growth would continue of its own volition, and the argument was all about redistribution. This was one reason — there were of course others like simple inexperience and straightforward mistakes — why the Labour government of 1964-70 did not surmount its economic problems'. That government went forward on the intellectual framework fashioned by Crosland, and the economic parts were not strong enough. I well remember Jim Callaghan when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer making his speech at the 1967 party conference. He picked up the National Plan and, shaking it at an unbelieving Hughie Scanlon, said: 'That's the engine, Hughie, that's the engine'. It was a magnificent oratorical trick in a brave speech, but economically it was totally empty, as a few weeks later devaluation was to prove.
It was the Left who first realised the inadequacy of the economic diagnosis and who sought to correct it. Hence the National Enterprise Board, planning agreements, large-scale nationalisation and all the other economic tosh which was got together in the back rooms of Transport House in the early 1970s. The Left may have been wrong — and are now not only wrong but sadly dated — but they were at least addressing the problem. Mrs Thatcher has in her way addressed the problem. The people who did not were the old-style social democrats who ran the Callaghan government. It is not therefore surprising that Labour lost the last general election. Even before the winter of discontent, Labour was not going anywhere very fast.
Thus Jo Grimond was right to raise the question (Spectator, 3 January) as to whether there is a middle ground any longer. Certainly if the corporate bureaucratic and slow-moving affair which Croslandite social democracy had become is the middle ground, it is a dreadful swamp. Many very decent social democratic people may still be very attached to it, and it has particularly strong adherents among the trade union leaders, but political radicals have to pick up their tents and pitch on something firmer if Britain is not to become poorer and less efficient and with even more unemployment. Even revisionism has got to be revised.
What this means is having a clearer and more honest view of why people work and the industrial arrangements within which they work best. It means understanding more fully the role of the market. It means a more professional approach to building an industrial strategy; we are probably about two decades behind the Japanese here. It means decentralising to break up bureaucracies and restore local initiative. In social terms it means putting people in the position to help themselves rather than forever enlarging the role of state welfare. This is social democracy with a tiger in its tank.
Jo Grimond is also right to argue that Mrs Thatcher could have pre-empted much of this ground if she had been more clever. Many instinctive Conservative responses work in the right direction and, deployed with intelligence, could have had some ' effect. But instead the present government has allowed itself to be inveigled into an ideological debate about monetarism which has been unnecessary and disastrous for the economy, and had also revealed in the heat of battle a callousness and double talk on social questions which has damaged their standing in the eyes of many people who gave them a fair wind at the general election.
They have also been traditionally conservative on constitutional questions, including electoral reform, which are today an integral part of a radical approach. Probably Lord Blake was right when he indicated some time ago that for the Conservatives to be radical was a contradiction in terms. Nor is a shift to wetness likely to save them. It will simply lead to a muddle and undermine self-confidence, as it did under Heath.
Since the Labour Party is likely to put up a series of woolly and negative compromises in the eternal attempts to keep the Left, the Right and the trade unions together, this leaves the breakaway social democrats looking much more coherently radical. The Liberals too have had a consistently radical approach on many of the central issues, and indeed it would be right, to say that in a number of areas the breakaway social democrats have moved towards the Liberals and away from the attitudes of the Callaghan government, which is one reason why an alliance not only makes political sense but is possible. Thus the middle ground has not only been strengthened but radicalised, and their perception of this makes the Council for Social Democracy, working with the Liberal Party, the best hope in British politics today.
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