British politics threatens to come apart at the seams

TheFor more than three decades since the end of the Second World War, Britain has enjoyed a tradition of moderate politics. This is now threatening to come apart at the seams.The battleground of the two major parties Labour and Conservative has been located, as it were, at the dead centre of the political spectrum. Here, the two parties have happily slogged it out with each other. But the choice now offered is between a US-style economic extremism that Margaret Thatcher is pulling the country towards, despite sizeable dissent within the Conservative party, and a doctrinaire leftism into which Tony Benn is pushing the Labour party, visited with the new scourge of defections.With Thatcher and Benn pulling and pushing in opposite directions, the middle ground of British politics lies untenanted, though not unoccupied. It was here that the sharp edges of the respective ideologies of the two major parties used to get blurred, if not totally disappear, giving rise to the post-war national consensus.Easy Time: The British electorate had an easy time making up its mind on the relative merits of the two parties. Labour was seen as the party of change (it introduced the West's list welfare state) but not of such radical change that it would rock the boat. The Conservatives were, regarded as applying the brakes to these changes, but not so hard as to put the juggernaut of welfare into reverse. Every five years or so, the voter returned one of the two parties into power, and every other five years or so he voted it out to make room for the other.So used have the British been to such consensual politics that they even invented a term for it, Butskellism, an acronym derived from the names of two of its foremost exponents. Rab Butler, a Conservative Chancellor, and Hugh Gaitskell, a Labour prime minister. Thatcherism on the right today is as far removed from Butskellism as Bennery is on the left.However, the middle ground of politics though being vacated is not yet vacant. For there is the third party, the Liberal, a perennial loser whose prospects have improved since the resignation of 14 Labour MPs who broke ranks at the thought of their party cutting loose from its centrist moorings. The defectors have formed themselves into a new organisation, the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and the prospect of an SDP-Liberal alliance at the next election is rated high.Lasting Affection: The Liberals have through the past three decades retained their hold on the affection of the British people. They have consistently secured something like 12-15 per cent of the popular vote while winning only half-a-dozen to a dozen seats in the House of Commons. The British voting system, like the Indian, is based on the first-past-the-post principle which (unlike proportional representation) enables parties to be returned to power on a minority of the popular, vote. Under this system, a small party like the Liberal has naturally suffered.The SDP's collective leadership-formed by "the gang of four" of Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins. David Owen and William Rodgers-has been slow to announce its programme, partly in order not to pre-empt the option of an SDP-Liberal merger. The Liberal leader, David Steele, is similarly waiting for a feedback from his constituents to see how far he can go to meet his new left-of-centre partners.Something of the new consensus that may emerge at the end of the present discussions is contained in a recent book by the most gifted of the Labour dissenters, Shirley Williams, once regarded as a potential prime minister in her old party. Her book Politics is for People, which was rushed through the printing to hit the bookstalls in time for the current political upheaval, sets out some of her ideas and beliefs. These may well furnish the basis for the new party's programme.In the book, she pointedly writes: "Politics are in disarray. Some people regard what is happening as a temporary dislocation which will be corrected before long, as if the world economy had pulled a muscle. But the changes we are seeing, in a time of such turbulence that our traditional institutions are being shaken on their roots, are not temporary. They cannot even be attributed to one system, capitalist or communist, for both systems are visibly cracking under the stress. The crisis is a crisis of industrialism itself."And she adds: "the old politics is dying. The battle to decide what the new politics will be like is just beginning. It is possible, just possible, that it will be a politics for people."Moderate Tradition: Serious doubts are also expressed in public discussions whether some of the Conservative "wets", rejecting Mrs Thatcher's extremism, will not be tempted to join the new alliance and help to restore the moderate tradition of politics. The tradition is so deeply entrenched that anything is possible, including the return of Mrs Thatcher to the path of moderation after abandoning midway her experiment to revamp the British economy.Whether she will is a question often raised in Britain today in its somewhat inelegant form: will the lady make a U-turn? To which Mrs Thatcher's response is characteristic of her robust aplomb. "The lady", she says, "is not for turning". Nor, add her supporters, "is she for burning" (presumably as a witch for her economic heresies).Some observer's feel that, threatened with certain rout at the next general election, Thatcher may well decide to recognise that it is politically expedient to retreat from her crusade and live to fight another day. They see evidence for this in at least two compromises she has made during her early months in office.On one occasion, under the threat of a miners' strike, similar to the one in 1974 which felled her predecessor, Edward Heath -although this time, the issue was not wages but her decision to close some uneconomic pits even at the risk of throwing people out of work-Thatcher stepped back from the brink in time. On another, she reluctantly agreed to bail out with funds two important public sector units, British Steel and British Leyland that were running up huge losses.It could also happen that Tony Benn might lose out in his bid to rewrite the conventions of his party organisation so as to give its militant activists a bigger say in prescribing socialist policies in a future Labour Government. All this is on the cards, perhaps even probable, given the British addiction to moderate politics and compromise.Mrs Thatcher and Benn may therefore well withdraw from their extremist positions. And Britain may well muddle through as before. But the fact that seems clear to an outside observer is that the basic issues raised by them about the stark choice that Britain must make between welfare and defence will not be resolved. It will only have been brushed under the carpet.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 5, 2014 13:45 IST--- ENDS ---

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British politics threatens to come apart at the seams

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