![]() On the ultra-Left-the dissidence of Dissent-a dozen ‘vanguard’ parties, and as many tendencies and groups, compete for the honour of leading a non-existent revolutionary working class, footnote 4 while on the wilder shores of life-style politics fragmentation and separatism grow. There has been a quite extraordinary mushrooming of inner-party groups. Founding Fathers, whether on the Right or Left of the political spectrum, are experienced as an embarrassment, an incubus to escape from rather than an authority to invoke. Even the Workers Revolutionary Party has split. The leader of Plaid Cymru, bravely nailing socialism to the Party’s mast-head, finds himself at war with his constituents, the farmers of North and West Wales. In the Centre there are now two major parties-the Liberals and the sdp-instead of one, and though at the time of writing they are working together in electoral amity, their personalities, constituencies and ethos seem likely to grow more, not less distinct (the incipient division between modernizers and greens may well scythe both in two). Behaviourally it is threatening to blow apart, with right-wing students throwing over the traces and blossoming out as seaside hooligans, Ulster Unionists accusing it of treachery and Elder Statesmen of sell-out. For its part, the Conservative Party seems more seriously divided than at any time since Munich on policy matters. After lumbering peacefully through 120 years of British history, and negotiating such pitfalls as the New Unionism of the 1890s, ‘Direct Action’ and the General Strike, the tuc has been threatened for two successive years with a prospect of imminent break-up. ![]() At the Blackpool tuc rippling hostilities on the conference floor found expression in angry charges of treachery, and counter-threats of secession. footnote 3 The trade unions, apparently untouched by the tremors of 1981–82 (though the secretary of the etu, not then ennobled, was a signatory to the original Council for Social Democracy appeal), have recently succumbed to divisions of their own making, with a dramatic intensification of sectional rivalries and serious threats of both individual and collective defections. But the Social Democratic breakaways of 1981–82 must now be acknowledged, even by those (like the present writer) hostile to them, as a genuine political secession which has peeled off generational layers of the professional classes-the parallel secessions from the Fabian Society, and its difficulties in coping with them, are indicative of the magnitude of the effect-while in the longer term it has proved seriously damaging in many erstwhile Labour strongholds. Ramsay MacDonald, in his celebrated defection of 1931, took with him a mere handful of supporters, his ‘National Labour’ party becoming no more than a temporary convenience to his Conservative masters. The Labour Party too has experienced its first decisive schism. The Communist Party has split for the first time in sixty-five years of existence, its frail barque threatening to capsize under what, by comparison with the tempests of the past, must seem the merest squall-the wording of an article in Marxism Today. footnote 2 At all points on the political compass there is a secularization of loyalties, a vertical disintegration of authority, a Balkanization of thought. The Labour Party tolerates degrees of indiscipline that would have been unthinkable in the days when Herbert Morrison swept the steps of Transport House, and its decision-making processes are almost as dispersed as those of the Liberals. At the top there is no ‘magic circle’ from which leaders can emerge, as Mr Gaitskell did in the Labour Party of the 1950s, Lord Hume in 1963, or Mr Thorpe in 1967 while at the base, in the constituency associations, there is a far more assertive sense of autonomy and rights. ![]() ![]() footnote 1 Party organization is increasingly molecular in character, with competing centres of influence rather than a clearly marked hierarchy of command. With the rise of the Alliance, Labour can no longer claim monopoly rights as the Party of ‘conscience and reform’, nor Conservatives enjoy undisputed hegemony in the outer suburbs-a heartland of their electoral support ever since the rise of the modern Party system. footnote * Four major parties are competing for the popular franchise (in Wales and Scotland five) where previously there were two, and there is an amoeba-like growth of minorities and tendencies within the parties themselves. B ritish political life at the present moment seems peculiarly fissiparous.
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