'83 Discussing the lessons of June Wilson's failure started the rot

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'Labour must not only support struggles like Greenham, but initiate them... A GREAT deal of nonsense has been written about the result of the general election. Some socialists have suggested that it is all Michael Foot's fault; other right wing Labour supporters declare that the Party will never win whilst it has a left wing programme and manifesto.

Suggestions such as these are miles wide of the mark. The truth is that long-term trends have been undermining the basis of the Labour vote since 1966: in that year, when Labour won a 96 seat overall majority in the House of Commons, Labour polled 48% of the popular. vote and won 363 seats.

By 1970, our share of the poll was down to 42.9%, with further falls to 37.2% in February 1974, 36.9% in May 1979, and 28% in 1983.

This is a record of unparallelled disaster. The 1983 election result is certainly the worst for Labour since 1918: 50 years of steady electoral progress have been wiped out in a decade.

Serious-minded socialists, anxious to explain this record, need to go back to the 1960s when this process of electoral decline began. It was the abjeci failure of the 1964-70 Wilson government that first precipitated the decline in working class support for Labour: in those years it looked as if the Party's collective leadership were interested only in government for its own sake.

That generation of Labour leaders which included Wilson, Callaghan, Brown, Jenkins, Foot and Owen are now thoroughly and totally discredited.

And because the leadership has discredited itself by failing to implement pro-working class policies, and in some cases by defecting to other parties, it is not surprising that many people are confused about. what the party stands for and mistrustful of the intentions of its top people.

There are, however, long term social trends which have also undermined the Labour vote. There has been a decline in the militancy and combativity of the working class as a whole, due largely to the impact of mass unemployment; and there has also been a substantial reduction in the blue collar trade union base as traditionally highly organised industries such as printing, coal mining, the railways and the docks have contracted.

These factors, probably in conjunction with a huge rise in ace Fourth, we must destroy the illusion that in order to win we have to jettison our policies, trim our ideology, and appeal to moderate opinion. Our task is to win the argument for socialism.

Fifth, we must undermine the credibility of the SDP as a major party. This is of critical electoral importance: for if the opposition to the Tories remains divided, we may be in for more than a decade of Thatcherite rule.

PEACE Thatcher: 'the Fuhrerprinzip'

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NOT BE l JOHN HARRIS