On 26 March 1981 in London's Connaught Rooms, before some 500 representatives of the world's press and two dozen camera crews from American and European television networks, a new party was born. In the nine months since its launch, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) has chalked up some notable successes:
* Its group at Westminster has more than double the number that sit on the Liberal benches; its 26 MPs include 24 defectors from the Labour Party, one from the Tories, and Shirley Williams, elected under the SDP's own colours in Crosby. As David McKie pointed out in the Guardian on 12 December, it has already virtually decimated (in the strict sense of removing one in ten) the Labour contingent of whose 268 MPs elected in May 1979. It has so far removed 26, if George Cunningham (now sitting as an independent) is taken into account.
* Between early July and the end of November, the SDP had won 24 local by-elections and their Alliance partners, the Liberals, 62. Between them, they have taken an average of 46 per cent of the vote and won some 51 per cent of the 169 contests recorded (New Statesman, 27 November 1981). Many more local councillors have defected from other parties (again, particularly from Labour) and at least one major metropolitan council has fallen into their hands in this way.
* Opinion polls consistently show the Liberal/SDP Alliance enjoying the support of some 40 per cent of the electorate as against 25 to 30 per cent each for the Tories and Labour.
Less measurable, but equally important, has been the new party's effect in catalysing a new politicisation among managerial and professional groups: especially senior and middle managers, media people, and academics. For the first time since the Wilson years, a wide range of economists, lawyers, and social administrators are emerging from their professional pigeon-holes and applying their thoughts to the modernisation of Britain. The journals of the British bourgeois intellectuals, traditionally classical, literary and historical in their concerns, have rediscovered politics and are earnestly debating the merits of social democracy. In effect, the British middle classes have emerged from a period in the wilderness with a new sense of mission, purpose, and direction. All this is neatly captured in Ian Bradley's book:
'The fact was that the SDP did have an enormous initial appeal for that new constituency which had grown up in the 1970s, the vaguely progressive, Guardian-reading middle class which worked in education, communications, technology, and the so-called caring professions, and was concerned about the Third World, the environment, the decentralisation of government and staying in Europe... The SDP was well aware that its initial support was likely to come from this group. Why else would it have placed its first advertisement in their house journal, the Guardian' (p 109).
Bradley's book also provides an extremely useful and well-informed blow-by-blow account of the formation of the new party, of the political persuasions and peculiarities of its leaders, and the character of its initial recruits. Where he sticks to describing events and explaining people's views, Bradley's book is instant journalism at its best; unlike many of his Fleet Street colleagues, Bradley — a political journalist of the Times and a supporter of the Liberal Party — displays a healthy detachment and while clearly not unsympathetic to the new party, he is never uncritical. The story he tells is absorbing, readable, and occasionally revealing.
When it comes to political analysis, however, the book must be judged a failure. Partly, this is a matter of Bradley's journalistic background and the tendency to rely on second hand retailing of other people's accounts. But more fundamentally, it is the product of his identification, if not with the party, with its intellectual underpinnings: thus the fundamental problem of British politics is simplistically presented as one of 'adversary politics' preventing the pursuit of 'sensible policies'; the progress of the Labour Party in the 1970s is seen through the spectacles of defectors like David Marquand and Stephen Haseler as a headlong flight to the left (would that it was!); and the 'breaking the mould' of the title is conceived simply in terms of ending the alternation of Labour and Tory governments that has marked British politics since the War.
Bradley has no sense (or at least conveys no sense) that there are alternative diagnoses of Britain's problems. His account is idealist in the worst sense: one looks in vain for an acknowledgment that the crisis of traditional politics is the result of a profound economic and social crisis of British Imperialism. For Bradley, as for the SDP, it is simply a matter of putting old wine (vintage claret perhaps) in new bottles. That radical measures rather than re-run compromises are necessary to confront the realities of British decline, discussed elsewhere in this issue of International, is not even considered. The consequence is that Breaking the Mould? does not even touch on the greatest danger faced by the new party: the disillusionment of its supporters that will necessarily ensue when the SDP/Liberal Alliance, either alone or more likely in coalition with a Thatcherless Tory Party, finds that the economic policies of Heath and Jenkins work no better under their new colours than they did under the old.
Perhaps more surprising is Bradley's weakness in analysing the character of the party and its policies. One can sympathise here with the difficulty of writing in its earliest days about a party determined not to make public more than a skeletal and uninformative statement of policy (he quotes David Owen replying to an enquiry about the new Party's manifesto: 'Look, love, if you want a manifesto, go and join one of the other parties!' (p120). But his use of Shirley Williams' and David Owen's respective books Politics is for People and Face the Future to fill in the gaps has already proved mistaken. 'Both David Owen and Shirley Williams... emphasise in their books that they are parties of socialists... Owen's first chapter... expresses his particular commitment to what he sees as a decentralist socialist tradition... now represented by European social democracy' (p 126).
The few short months since these words were written have provided ample evidence both in terms of the leadership (Jenkin's ascendancy over Owen and Williams) and the membership (whose attitudes, see particularly New Statesman, 4 December 1981, indicate that their party will end up, if anything, to the right of the Liberals) that the SDP's connections with any form of socialism will be tenuous to say the least. It is interesting in this respect, to note how many references to 'Socialism' have been deleted in the revised paperback edition of Owen's book and replaced with less contentious terms.
Perhaps part of the problem, here, lies in Bradley's failure to differentiate sufficiently between the politics of Owen and Williams, on the one hand, and the Jenkinsites, on the other. While he distinguishes two quite distinct groups in the party middle class Croslandite reformists and right-wing labour movement bureaucrats — there are, in fact, as Paul Thompson argues in a useful article in Revolutionary Socialism (Winter 81/82), more accurately three. And while a proliferation of study groups work away at producing new, somewhat less statist, Fabian blueprints for Britain's future social services, it is becoming increasingly clear that a far from radical Jenkinsite economic policy will make them the first electoral promises to be broken.
So what of breaking the mould? Bradley suggests that incidental factors may make the Liberals the main beneficiaries of the SDP's emergence; or the SDP may 'sink without trace... the cruellest trick yet played on Britain by its crazy electoral system' (p 160). With a few months of extra evidence of the Alliance's growing electoral support, of the continuing civil war in the Labour Party exacerbated by the present attempts to witchunt the left, and the apparent impossibility of deflecting the Tories from pursuing the Thatcherite course to the end, it now looks almost certain that the SDP and Liberals will be centrally involved in the government elected in 1984. In Bradley's limited sense, then, they will have broken the mould, and if they pursue their pledge to implement a system of proportional representation, British bourgeois party politics will never be the same again.
Whether the new British politics will be shaped in a Social Democratic mould is, however, quite a different question and one whose answer lies largely in the hands of the labour movement. For it is only if we fail to develop a clear and popular socialist alternative as disillusionment with the performance of the SDP in government sets in, that we will offer up on a plate the possibility of constructing a new hegemonic alliance to the ruling class. The Social Democrats may be the breakers of the mould; the question is who will pick up the pieces?