No ballot-box solution to rise of SDP

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Self-exposure 'AT last the don't knows have a party they can vote for' , joked one cartoonist last week as the SDP swept to victory in the Crosby bya Shate Will Tory Fried runner and trounced a left wing Labour challenger in her runaway victory which confirmed the strong tide which has flowed toward the SDP/Liberal alliance since the Warrington and Croydon by elections.

BBC computers flashed out improbable predictions of an overwhelming victory for the SDP in a general election, leaving Tories and Labour reduced to less than 100 seats between them.

True or not, an important change has taken place.

For Labour left wingers who really believe that socialism can be achieved through the ballot box, there is every reason to be despondent. It is now evident that the SDP/Liberal alliance stands a real chance of preventing the election of a Labour government in the next General Election. And Tory 'dissident' Edward Heath has talked of a possible future coalition with the SDP.

Meanwhile, the electoral successes of the SDP are being used by Labour's right wing as a sledgehammer to crush the struggle for socialist policies.

There is in fact little evidence that it is the nebulous policies of the SDP that have struck a chord with the electorate. MORI's repeated opinion polls suggest that SDP voters have little understanding of or support for the party's positions. And the SDP has since its inception been characterised by having more (second-hand) MPs than it has (second-hand)

established policies.

The most recent and extensive survey of the views of SDP members shows an almost even split between COMMUNISTS were among the first to recognise the danger to the labour movement from the emergence of the Social Democratic Party'.

So claimed Communist Party general secretary Gordon McLennan last week.

But he only told part of the story.* There was a good reason for the €P to be the first to know - because they began losing some of their members to the new party!

Prominent CP member Sue Slipman - a former member of the CP's executive committee and leading light in the CP-dominated student Broad Left - was swift to join the new party, insisting that she saw a polthose favouring increased taxation to improve public services, as against those opposed to it. 32% of SDP members favour cutting tax relief on mortgages while 64% are against. 67% oppose the SDP proposal to set up regional assemblies. (Of course, none of this is characterised as the SDP tearing itself apart.)

It is only on their most savage anti-working class policies - their call for wage controls, their demand for more anti-union laws, their uncritical support for the EEC and their opposition to nuclear disarmament - that the SDP leaders have large majority support even among their own members.

But all of these policies are shared by section of the Tory and Labour leadership: none are distinctively SDP. It can scarcely be argued therefore that itical continuity between her views in the CP and the policies of the 'Gang of Four' Certainly the politics of the CP in NUS - forming a cynical bloc with the Tories against the left wing -have had more in common with the SDP than they have with socialism.

Right

And the resolute insistence upon Parliamentcentred politics embodied in the CP's 'British Road to Socialism' is far to the right of many forces currently active in the Labour Party.

It was no surprise therefore that McLennan prudently avoided explaining last week how he would suggest the CP carry out voters have responded to the new party's programme What they plainly have responded to is its pretensions to be 'new' Boosted by a huge and unflagging campaign of media publicity, a party which combines giftwrapped Gaitskellite Labourism with the least liberal aspects of Liberal policy has succeeded in portraying itself as a novel element in British politics. Its mouldy message of 'moderation' has gripped the minds of the middle class.

It is only possible to understand the parasitic growth of the SDP, at the expense of both Tories and Labour, if we first understand the frustrations and Indeed the real force behind Shirley Williams has WITH Tory MPs still reeling from the Crosby by-election, one of them is moving purposefully ahead with a relentless campaign.

His dream is to see a statue of former Tory leader Stanley Baldwin erected in Parliament Square.

And he has taken advantage of the current political realignment to broaden the the task of 'exposit SDP-Liberal fraud'.

Perhaps Mcl ennan should begin by a MORI poll of his surviving members, to check their voting intentions at the next innan been precisely the TUC and Labour leaders who now so vocally heap the blame on the Labour left.

These leaders have done everything in their power to prevent working class action to challenge the Tories. They have sat back and watched cuts rip public services; they have watched closures and redundancies take an unending toll of jobs, creating long-term mass unemployment; they have abandoned the struggle to defend living standards against inflation; many have joined - right and 'left' alike - in raising rents and rates in half-baked efforts to ward off more cuts at the cost of alienating many workers and the middle class.

Thanks to these leaders, two and a half years of Thatcherism has seen no active lead from the workers' movement capable of goe base of his support. Former Labour leaders Callaghan and Wilson have now joined the list of Tory MPs backing the scheme.

With such reverence being shown by Labour's right wing towards the Tory leader who provoked the 1926 General Strike and starved out the miners' strike which followed it, winning the support of the millions of middle class voters who have turned in disgust from the government that many of them helped put into office in 1979.

Alienation from the Tories by no means brings such people to an understanding • of the need for socialist solutions to the crisis - particularly when socialist solutions are explicitly and vocally rejected by Labour's own parliamentary leadership and by a majority of TUC leaders.

Indeed on many issues the SDP and Labour majority are agreed. Both oppose serious action to challenge and remove the Tories. Both offer empty anti-Tory rhetoric. Both flirt with the idea of wage control - and attack the Left of the Labour Party.

Neither offers a coherent policy to meet the crisis of British capitalism. Both oppose nationalisation. • Under such conditions the media has succeeded in giving the SDP the edge - as some kind of radical 'new' answer. Confused and anxious middle class voters have joined the SDP bandwagon - and as it has gathered speed, so it has also drawn in confused and demoralised sections of workers.

The result has been that Labour has been firmly binded as the party of 'extiemism' - while in reality its so-called extreme policies are blocked at each stage by the right wing, and at best only lamely and passively pursued by most of the 'left' Labour's right wing is now clearly on the warpath. They will use the Crosby result as an argument for making the Labour Party even more like the its platform.

Under such pressure, woolly sections of the Parliamentary Left and their supporters can already be heard with their knees knocking like castanets.

They accept the right wing claim that it is the 'divisions' in the Labour Party rather than its lack of any political answer to the SDP that have lost working class support. And from there they must go along with right wing demands for 'unity' around the same wretched policies of capitalcrisis management which were implemented by Wilson and Callaghan.

The fact is that there is no pure ballot-box solution either to the Thatcher gov. ernment or to the SDP The answer to both is one and the same: the fight to mobilise mass working class industrial action to defeat the Tory offensive and drive Thatcher from office, coupled with a patient political struggle within the workers' movement for a programme of socialist policies and a new leadership prepared to carry them out.

The scale of the swing to the SDP demonstraves the difficulty of this struggle after 2½ years of betrayals, with the dead weight of thire million unemployed weighing on the minds of trade unionists on the shop floor.

But unless we are to believe that Williams Steel and Heath can, witl the help of the trade union leaders, between them bring a halt to the class struggle in 1984, we musi recognise the neer to press forward the fight for action to defend existing jobs, wages, and demo cratic rights and for socialIst poncle. can offer hope of creating three million new jobs fo

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