The last political "realignment"

There is some talk going on about the need for a political realignment, for new parties to make a break-through, for old parties to split according to ideas and even ideology - it seems to be leading nowhere. What with the talk and with the many reminiscences of the seventies and eighties that followed Lady Thatcher's death this is undoubtedly a good time to recall the last time an attempt at political realignment seemed to fail though it probably succeeded in the long run and in an unexpected fashion.

In 1981, two years after what turned out to be one of the most significant elections of modern British history, dissatisfied members of the Labour Party, led by the "Gang of Four", Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers, set up a new party, which, they hoped, would carry on the more Social-Democratic tradition of the Labour Party, which had been, in their and many others' opinion, taken over by left-wing Marxist activists.

While David Owen and Bill Rodgers were still sitting MPs, Shirley Williams had lost her seat in 1979 and Roy Jenkins had more or less opted out of British politics, which was becoming unpalatable to him in 1977, when he became President of the European Commission. After January 1981 Wembley Conference, which committed the Labour Party to unilateral disarmament, they finally faced up to the fact that they had only two choices: either conform with the left-wing Marxist movement that was taking over the party or to break away and form a new one.

The summary of the party's history on Wikipedia is, in fact, quite good, though many of the details and twists and turns necessarily had to be left out.

The new party formed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party very soon after its formation and this continued till 1988 when the two parties merged more formally, the mould not having been broken though somewhat dented. As Charles Moore points out in the first volume of his Thatcher biography, the Gang of Four had not been paying enough attention to what was going on in the Conservative Party, underestimating Thatcher and her increasing influence on British politics. One could say that they had made the decision to break away from the Labour Party too late. If only they had done so when the first calls for a new, centrist, Social-Democrat party had started in the mid-seventies ....

For the story of that attempt at political realignment goes back  to some years before 1981, though many of the players are less well remembered than the Gang of Four and their followers. There is the story of the Social Democratic Alliance, a group of Labour politicians at various levels who struck out boldly against the extreme left-wing infiltration of the party and what they saw, with a good deal of justification, as the pusillanimous behaviour by the party leadership and its Gaitskillite social-democratic wing. Though there was half-hearted support from Roy Jenkins, the other later "rebels" shied away from the fight. Indeed, I recall Shirley Williams appearing on TV to tell us all that she could not understand what the SDA's members were complaining about: she could see no extremist infiltration and Militant was not a problem. She might have been that stupid (you can never tell with Baroness Williams as she is now) or she might have been frightened to tell the truth or she might have thought it was a clever manoeuvre.

Then there were the deselection fights in several constituencies with moderate or right-wing MPs, which were painful and long-drawn with varying results. The most important of these was in Newham North-East where the battle against Militant and various Trostskyist infiltrators was fought by the man who probably did more than anyone else to bring the truth out into the open and whose apparently hopeless struggle produced a curious success eventually: Reg Prentice.

It is wonderful to find that his name is being restored into its rightful place in modern British political history  by Geoff Horn's new biography, published by Manchester University Press, called Crossing the Floor - Reg Prentice and the crisis of British social democracy.

Dr Horn, an expert on social-democratic politics in the Labour Party, has produced an exhaustive and detailed account of the gradual disintegration of that party in the seventies and eighties and of the gradual control exerted over trade unions, local party organizations and, eventually, the national organization. Perhaps, it is a little too detailed for a non-geek. After a while, one gets exhausted by the account of all the meetings and all the resolutions but it is worth persevering as much of what happened afterwards in British politics is rooted in those apparently boring squabbles, hastily called meetings, dubious votes, legal injunctions and, most of all, inability on the part of Labour's right, the Gaitskillites to throw off their political paralysis.

There were exceptions to the latter and one of the most important ones was Reg Prentice, a man of impeccable socialist credentials who, nevertheless, stood up against union violence, political intimidation and extreme left-wing ideology, proclaiming over and over again the need for law and order, for sensible economic compromises, for parliamentary democracy. For his pains he was deselected in his constituency and was subjected to a good deal of harassment. He tried to fight back but did not succeed, thought of standing as an independent when he realized that his idea of a new, social-democratic party was not being taken up by his colleagues and, eventually, crossed the floor and joined the Conservative Party.

Prentice was a decent and honourable man though not an easy one to deal with. Men who feel inspired by a political mission rarely are and if they are losing the battle even less so. For all of that he was right as many in the Labour Party recognized too late.

The book tries to be objective but one cannot help feeling some contempt for the so-called Right in the Labour Party, the supposed Gaitskillites and self-defined social-democrats who did not have the courage to back either the rebels of the SDA or Reg Prentice when these tried to persuade the grandees that the Labour Party had to split and a new political alignment was needed. Nor does Dr Horn spare the two leaders of the time, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan who turned out to be incapable of dealing with the clearly evidenced infiltration. Their punishment was to watch the Labour Party's decade of growing political irrelevance.

The realignment did not happen as envisaged even when the new party was formed. By this time many of the electorate who might have supported it in the mid-seventies had decided that they quite liked Thatcher's Conservatives and voted accordingly. The left-wing activists of the Labour Party were right in one thing: the post-war consensus was failing the country and changes were needed. They simply were wrong as to which kind of changes and the Labour establishment was powerless to fight them.

It would not be correct to say that there was no realignment at all. After a decade or more of progressive destruction and disintegration, after the split that created the SDP, after Michael Foot's spectacularly inept leadership of the party, there was a concerted effort to sort the mess out. It took a few years and a good deal of money but Militant tendency was defeated and its influence in the party negated. It took another few years for the policies to be changed and for the party to become electable under the much disliked yet highly successful Tony Blair.

Dr Horn discusses briefly whether New Labour is, in fact, the social-democrat party that Reg Prentice and the others would have liked to see. Perhaps it is. But one can also argue that we now have two or even three social-democrat parties and, confusingly, the electorate do not seem to like any of them all that much.

Geoff Horn:                 

Crossing the floor - Reg Prentice and the crisis of British social democracy

2013                          Manchester University Press

Gooey trance

Setting aside the excitement about the vote in the Commons on prisoners' voting rights, since we shall not know the eventual outcome till there is a reaction from the ECHR, I thought I'd turn to the film that is described by the more hysterical part of the journalistic fraternity and sorority as a cultural phenomenon or something like that, The King's Speech.

As I mentioned before, I reviewed the film on the New Culture Forum. I thought it was good in the way British films can be good: well acted, well scripted, pleasantly sentimental and accurate in details of period paraphernalia. Not one of the greatest but, given the low standard of film-making in most countries in recent years and even decades, highly to be commended. I also thought the historical research was shoddy beyond belief with just about every historical detail outside the central theme of the Duke of York, later King George VI overcoming his disability were wrong to the point of atrociousness. Other critics picked up on it as well, in particular castigating the change in Churchill's role in the Abdication crisis. As it happens even the central theme played around with some of the timing and details but that is not such a big problem - a film has to have dramatic logic.


Inevitably, I was accused, though not by all, of being nit-picky. At least it shows the monarchy in a good light. It's still rubbishy history, I replied. But if it makes people go back to the actual events and read about the history, it will be worth it. That I cannot argue with. Anything that makes people find out more about their country's history (fairly recent history at that) is a good thing in my opinion.

Sadly, this does not seem to be happening. There is some talk of a new edition of Sarah Bradford's biography of George VI, The Reluctant King, but it remains muted. A few articles appeared about the "real' George VI but these did not tell us anything that was not already in the film. And there was a ridiculous campaign to make George VI out to be a secret Nazi sympathizer; this was, one suspects, motivated by a desire to prevent any Oscars being awarded to the film. The campaign seems to have had no effect on audiences in America, let alone Britain.

For the most part, the historical aspect of the story has been passing the entranced viewers by. The general reaction, as far as I can make out, has been a form of gooey trance with the story seen as little more than a heart-warming, feel-good soap opera plot. History? What history? A pox upon your history.

I suppose it is not unreasonable to see the film as a traditional fairy tale: younger brother (in this case a prince but that is of secondary importance) starts with a manifest disadvantage yet manages to overcome it through courage and persistence and the help of his entourage, acquiring a throne in the process, and proving himself to be worthy of it. Nothing wrong with the plot, especially if it inspires people to think in terms of courage and persistence rather than entitlement. I have seen no sign of that effect either but it may develop. For all of that, it is heartbreaking to see that another chance to learn about the history of Britain is not being taken up through sentimentality.

Is this important?

There is a feeling around, which I share, that we know far too much about politicians’ and other vacuous celebrities’ private lives. Do I really want to know that the wife of Northern Ireland’s First Minister had an affair and, feeling depressed, thought about suicide, even if she is a politician herself? Oh how I don’t. Then again, if there is a matter of public finance being misappropriated the or, at the very least, money being acquired without any indication of a clash of interests, story becomes justifiably public

Do I care which schools politicians choose for their children? Certainly not, unless they also ensure through their votes that the rest of this country’s population has no similar choices.

In other words, it is sometimes difficult to work out where private ends and public begins. Each case has to be regarded individually and the assumption ought to be that privacy applies to politicians as much as anyone else, particularly if it is a matter of health. Unless …..

Unless important events are happening and a political leader’s health is of vital importance. This relates to a review in the Wall Street Journal of a few days ago of a book about President Roosevelt and his health, particularly in the last few months of his life that just happened to include the Yalta Conference.

As the article points out:

There is a familiar, almost immutable narrative to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's life: A vigorous young patrician politician is struck down by polio at age 39, struggles to recover his mobility and his career, is elected governor of New York and eventually president by virtue of his grit and the press's willingness to play down his infirmity and, finally—in facing down the Depression and then Hitler and Tojo—works himself to death even as he gives life to a liberated world.

A quick look at the photographs of the three leaders at Yalta in early 1945 show that Roosevelt, the youngest of them, was looking considerably more tired and unwell than the other two. (Stalin was looking particularly pleased with himself, as well he might.)

At the time people did not want to believe that one of the war leaders should be mortally ill but since then there has been a great deal of discussion about the possibility that Roosevelt had, for some time, been suffering from cancer.

Why does it all matter? According to the authors, "it is inexplicable that FDR, given his grim prognosis, made no effort to ensure that, should the worst occur, he would be succeeded by a strong and capable vice president." Roosevelt's third-term vice president, Henry Wallace, was "dangerously naïve about Stalin and the Soviet Union; had he become president during the war, it is inconceivable that the conflict and the postwar world would have taken the same
course."

As for the inexperienced Harry Truman, the slowly declining Roosevelt got
lucky with the selection of his fourth-term running mate. "FDR's Deadly Secret"
doesn't assign a nefarious design to FDR's behavior; he was, though, making "one
of the greatest gambles in world history," hoping to stay alive long enough to
achieve his goals.

Indeed, America and the western world were lucky in that it was not Henry Wallace, the man known to be one of the Soviets’ useful idiots, who took over in 1945 and the worries about Truman (who was not actually as inexperienced as people sometimes make out) proved to be unfounded.

There is another aspect to Roosevelt’s obvious health problems. What was it he really wanted to achieve beyond victory over Germany and Japan? Had he even formulated it to himself? Roosevelt’s inability to stand up to Stalin was notorious. Did this have anything to do with his health and the heavy medication he would have been taking? Or did it have more to do with the fact that he was surrounded by people like Alger Hiss, a very close presidential adviser at Yalta, throughout the negotiations and between them? One can go beyond that and ask how many people around Churchill may have been taking orders and reporting back to one of the organizations in Moscow? British investigations into that issue have lagged behind the American ones.

Interestingly enough, the December issue of Standpoint carried a long article on that very theme but dealing with British politicians. “Should we know about our leaders’ health?” asked Jeremy Hugh Baron who has had a seemingly distinguished career in medicine though not, I suspect, as an ordinary physician.

The article goes through the many problems Churchill and Eden had with their health, as well as the ones Attlee did. To us it seems quite extraordinary that it was not just the public who were not told about Churchill’s heart attack during the war, he did not himself. Moran, his physician, took a lot upon himself.

So how much of Churchill’s inability to stand up to Stalin, how many of his numerous mistakes were due to his ill health and how much of it would have happened anyway, given the complexity of the situation? Should the public have realized that the country was being governed by people who were seriously ill or their substitutes?

The most shocking tale is of Churchill’s second premiership, which, many would argue, ought not to have happened, anyway, as Sir Winston was past the time, because of his age and the condition of his health, when he could have taken on something as difficult as that.

In June 1953, Churchill had his fifth and most severe stroke, which caused him to stagger and speak with a slur. But the Cabinet noticed nothing amiss. His left side became paralysed and he was driven to Chartwell. He ordered Colville to tell no one. Moran warned that Churchill might die that weekend, so Colville sent for the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rab Butler and Salisbury and told the Palace.

Ordinarily, Churchill should have resigned, as his wife wished, and the Queen sent for Eden. However, that day Eden was being operated on in Boston. It was held to be unfair to Eden if Butler was appointed PM. Butler could have asserted himself, but as on two later occasions when he might have claimed the post, he loyally held back. There was no way a peer, such as Lord Salisbury, could have been made a caretaker premier, so a conspiracy was hatched.

The first problem was the bulletin. Moran had prepared, and he and Brain signed, a tactful but honest bulletin: "For a long time, the Prime Minister has had no respite from his arduous duties and a disturbance of the cerebral circulation has developed, resulting in attacks of giddiness. We have therefore advised him to abandon his journey to Bermuda and to take at least a month's rest."

Butler and Salisbury vetoed this because medical correspondents would correctly tell the public that their PM had suffered a stroke. When King George VI had his chest operation, a bulletin talked loosely about "structural changes in the lung", and while doctors assumed correctly that this meant cancer, this was not widely discussed in the press
…
Butler and Salisbury therefore prepared their own bulletin, which the two physicians agreed to sign: "The Prime Minister has had no respite for a long time from his very arduous duties and is in need of a complete rest. We have therefore advised him to abandon his journey to Bermuda and to lighten his duties for at least a month."

Colville sent for the three press lords, Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose, who agreed to a total gag. Butler took the Cabinet and told them of Churchill's stroke, although this was not minuted, while the business of the state was conducted by Colville and Churchill's son-in-law, Christopher Soames.

However, surprisingly, Churchill made a remarkable recovery, chaired the Cabinet, again refused his family's advice to resign and, helped by Moran's stimulant tablets, made successful speeches to the House of Commons and the party conference: "If I stay on for the time being, bearing the burden at my age, it is not because of love for power or office.

The idea that matters of state could have been conducted by the Prime Minister’s secretary and his son-in-law, whose political abilities were never of the highest order or even half-way good defies one’s imagination. The fact that RAB Butler did not insist that, in the circumstances, the Queens should have sent for him shows that he was not cut out to be Prime Minister.

There is, however, no doubt that, as a consequence of all this shenanigans he country and the Conservative Party suffered.

The last few days have been complicated

Anway, I am now trying to get back into my stride with the blog because there is a great deal to write about. As the year goes on, I fear that I shall have to spend more time on EU matters plus British politics, both as dull as ditchwater but closely linked and of some importance with an election coming up. However, I do intend to write about other subjects as well.

In the meantime, here is a link to a fascinating article in the Times, sent to me by an American friend (I think they still take that rag seriously on the other side of the Pond but I am not sure) about opinions expressed in Yemen.

The title says it all: ‘We regret driving out the British,’ say Aden’s former rebels. Of course, they did not exactly drive the British out. There was a definite policy: Aden was going to go independent as everything else had gone independent. It was a perfectly sensible policy, as there was no point in keeping Aden with no Empire to serve but the last few months there were very nasty and the region's subsequent history has been even nastier.