Thatcherism is a coherent strategy for the British ruling class to defeat the labour movement. The SDP/Liberal Alliance can only play a major role in bourgeois policy after such a defeat argues Rich Palser, presenting another view of the British political crisis.
In a series of articles in recent issues of International, John Ross has argued that the rise of the Social Democratic Party (SDP)/Liberal Alliance marks a major watershed in British politics, and that its roots lie within the very structure of British capitalism. 'To understand what is happening in Britain today [one has to recognise that the dominant sections of the ruling class are no longer] the British domestic industrial bourgeoisie who, on the contrary, are represented by Heath, the Liberals and the SDP'.
Historically, John argues, the economically dominant force in the Tory Party was banking capital, whose interests lay in the overseas financial and investment operations of British imperialism. The interests of this section of the ruling class have often been in contradiction with, and have generally prevailed over, those of the section whose interests lay in domestic industrial investment. Today, however, the ruling class can no longer pursue this course: without a strong domestic economy, even the overseas financial operations of British capital are put at risk. Consequently, the interests of domestic industrial capital represented by the Tory wets and the SDP/Liberal Alliance are coming to the fore.
This view of a structural contradiction within British imperialism is by no means a new one. It was argued at some length, for example, by Glyn and Sutcliffe who cite three main examples of the rivalry between finance and industrial capital: free trade versus protectionism between 1880 and 1913; high versus low exchange rates in the 1920s, 1950s and 1960s; and high versus low interest rates in the same periods. 'Of course, this conflict is not absolute: now and again the interests of the banks and large sections of industry, especially the large exporters, have coincided. However, over the years the divergence has grown bigger.'
The structure of British Capitalism
Whatever the validity of this analysis of British economic history which is debatable, this view seems to me to take little account of structural changes in British capitalism since the Second World War. First, British industry now has a greater concentration of production, investment and employment in large firms than any economy of comparable size or development. In the mid-1970s the hundred top British firms had 62 per cent of the turnover, employed 49 per cent of the capital, and took 56 per cent of the profits of the top 1000. The top ten (Shell, British American Tobacco, Imperial Chemical Industries, Unilever, Imperial Group, BL, Shell Mex and BP, General Electric, The Bowater Group, and British Petroleum) had 24 per cent of the turnover of the largest 1000. The concentration of capital also took place in banking — Nat West and Barclays had greater deposits and assets than all the other banks put together.
Second, by the mid-1970s Britain was a major home base for multinational companies, and a major host for overseas-based multinationals. In 1969 there were 1651 subsidiaries of British companies located abroad, or 23.5 per cent of all multinational subsidiaries. Only the US had more, with 2816 or 40 per cent of the total. By 1977, overseas production by British multinationals was 40 per cent of domestic production. These companies, unlike purely British-based companies, can derive benefits as well as disadvantages from policies which in the past have tended to favour overseas financial operations — for example the appreciation of sterling.
Third, the control of companies in Britain has tended to shift away from personal holdings towards greater direct control by financial institutions. From 1963 to 1969 personal holdings in British companies fell from 54 to 47 per cent and were down to 42 per cent by 1975. Financial interests on the other hand increased their holdings in British companies from 30 per cent in 1963, to 36 per cent in 1969 and 40 per cent in 1975. This, together with the growth in multiple directorships, marks an increased interpenetration of the financial and industrial interests of the ruling class.
To recognise that particular government policies may favour the financial operations of capital over industrial operations is one thing; to suggest that these constitute distinct factions (finance and industrial capital) is quite another. The overwhelmingly dominant sections of the ruling class are those whose interests are tied up with huge financial and industrial concerns which are international in character. In the present crisis they therefore face a challenge to their interests on two fronts.
Britain has more direct investments abroad than any other European country. These interests are increasingly under threat from the colonial revolution, which received a tremendous boost with the victory over US imperialism in Vietnam. This is why Britain has been in the forefront among Western European countries in backing Reagan's war drive and why the whole of the ruling class has united behind Thatcher over the Falklands crisis. Britain has gone to war over the Falklands because it remains a major imperialist power in its own right, and cannot be seen to be unable to defend its interests. The jingoism of the British press and the Tory backwoodsmen may well be nostalgia for the empire, but behind it lies the government's determination to defend the huge industrial and financial interests Britain still has throughout the world and in particular in Latin America. The absence of any outcry from any bourgeois politicians (whatever factional interest they supposedly represent) testifies to the fact that the City and industrial capital alike understand their common stake in Britain's international role.
The ability of the ruling class to maintain these interests is, however, increasingly undermined by the uncompetitiveness of British industry at home. In absolute terms the wages of British workers are low. Nor has the rate of increase in wages been particularly high in comparison to Britain's main competitors. However, low productivity, which in the 1960s and '70s increased more slowly than any of Britain's competitors, means high unit labour costs. Alongside its international war drive, the ruling class as a whole must simultaneously inflict a major defeat on the British working class if it is to be able to re-structure British industry as a sound domestic base for its international operations.
Who is Breaking The Mould?
Thatcher and her government offered a new and radical programme for the ruling class to meet these problems head on. To understand this strategy not only requires looking beyond the jingoistic nostalgia of Tory backbenchers — it also means looking beyond the trappings of monetarist ideology. It is not whether Thatcher achieves her M3 target for the money supply which is decisive, nor in itself the level of public borrowing. It is her total rejection of the post-war consensus whereby government intervention was aimed at maintaining full employment and services. Thatcher threw this out for a government strategy which, contrary to the view John Ross has argued, was simultaneously a political and economic strategy. This strategy centred upon deliberately pushing up mass unemployment so as to create the conditions for confrontation and defeat of the organised working class movement. It was a political strategy in that it shifted government priorities and resources towards arming Britain for its world role in imperialism's war drive, whilst drawing the lesson of the Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments that an incomes policy could only bring lasting results in the context of long-term mass unemployment. It was economic in that it sought to use the recession to force the weakest sections of British industry to the wall so as to leave British industry 'leaner but fitter'. Control of the money supply was the means to carry this out, rather than the strategy itself.
Thus, far from Thatcher's policies being, as John Ross originally argued, 'in the present relation of forces against the interests of the most decisive sections of the bourgeoisie', her policies were a recognition of the present relation of forces within the ruling class, and the means by which the ruling class sought to change the relation of class forces against the working class. Heath and the Liberals offered, and still offer, no solution to that basic problem. That is why in the year of the last general election only one top British company donated money to the Liberals, as against 70 per cent of all political donations going direct to the Tory party. It was Thatcher who chose to break the mould of the post-war consensus and the ruling class was united behind her.
Is this to say that the ruling class sit around in their West End clubs singing 'One for bourgeois unity and ever more shall be so'? Far from it. But the threat to the unity of the ruling class comes not from their separation into factions based on industrial and finance capital due to the level of interest rates and the rate of the pound sterling. Whilst criticism has been voiced on this by those ruling class representatives most concerned with its industrial and manufacturing operations (for example Beckett of the CBI), nothing ever came of the promised bare-knuckle fight between industry and the Tories, and Tory desertion to the SDP is notable by its virtual absence. As Andrew Gamble has argued: 'The fundamental weakness of the wets' position has been their inability to construct a convincing alternative. What options do exist for those who wish to preserve the rule of capital in Britain? Since they have to acknowledge the failure of the various attempts to modernise the British economy over the last twenty years it is hard for the Conservative critics of monetarism to reject the logic of the Thatcherite case'.
Thatcher's policies, far from being aimed at favouring finance capital at the expense of industrial capital as Tom Nairn has argued are aimed at opening Britain up to the full effects of the international recession, with the aim of re-structuring the economy. Removal of controls on the free movement of credit is not undertaken by the government just to allow capitalists to make a fast buck abroad (though they have) but in an attempt to force British industry to rationalise itself so as to compete for investment on the international money market. Similarly it is not the government's intention just to boost bank profits by maintaining high interest rates, but to ensure that money borrowed by industry finds its way into long term investment and higher productivity rather than into sitting-out the recession till better days. Mass unemployment is the essential backdrop to this, as it not only makes conditions far more favourable for the ruling class to introduce new work practices and technology, it also may in the longer term weaken the ability of the working class to grab back these gains in productivity through big wage increases as any upturn occurs.
So what have they achieved? Manufacturing output per person has certainly fallen more in this recession than in the previous two. Given that the recession was deeper this is hardly surprising. Furthermore the rise in productivity per person-hour now taking place is far more rapid than that following the previous two recessions. If this trend continues, and Thatcher's optimistic view holds to be true (that the working class will not be able to take back these gains through big wage increases), then the government will have made some headway. Alternatively, as the Economist points out: 'If the pessimists are right and the old habits return, the Thatcher government's attempts to break the mould of the post-war consensus will have failed. And the decline that these policies produced will continue'.
As John Ross has recently admitted: 'As the crucial test of the upturn has not yet arrived, it (the ruling class) would be foolish indeed to withdraw its support (for Thatcher) before at least the first substantial results become available'. Holding onto the potential gains won by the ruling class during the recession will require taking on workers in battles to impose new work patterns and weaken union organisation; these struggles have already begun in the Fords, BL, British Rail and pit closure disputes, and the trend towards national drawn-out disputes over productivity will continue. It also requires that unemployment is maintained at mass levels even during any upturn in the economy.
It is here that the potential threat to ruling class unity lies, for as Andrew Gamble has commented: 'What the wets fear is that the adherents of the social market strategy are blind to its social and political consequences. They fear that it will unleash a class war and divide the nation. They fear it could make the country ungovernable and precipitate a confrontation which [in a period of] recession the Conservative Party might not win'.
What is the SDP/ Liberal Alliance?
Thatcher's project has no hope of completion during this term of office. This presents the ruling class with an obvious political problem as, not surprisingly, the Thatcher government is unpopular; when it broke the mould it awoke a strong memory within the organised workers' movement, the memory of the 1930s to which we were never to return. A substantial section of the working class, also intent on breaking the mould of the Wilson and Callaghan governments, has fought to drag the Labour Party to the left despite the kicking and screaming of the labour bureaucracy.
The SDP split from the Labour Party was also a split from the labour movement. Despite the involvement of union leaders like Frank Chapple in the Council for Social Democracy, at no time did they threaten to break Labour's monopoly of union affiliation. Alongside the motley crew of Fabian opportunists and careerists who departed from the Labour Party before their positions as MPs and councillors were challenged by the rank and file, the new Social Democratic Party was flooded by professionals and higher salaried workers who long to hold on to the post-war boom and avoid the class polarisation now taking shape in Britain. The SDP's capitalist programme is a programme in the mould of the (now non-existent) post-war consensus. Its electoral base is the middle class and the poorly organised and less class conscious workers who had previously voted both Labour and Tory.
If the labour bureaucracy continues to succeed in obstructing any unified fightback against the Tories on the part of the organised labour movement, then it is quite likely that despite the unpopularity of the Thatcher government, the SDP/Liberal Alliance will win a sufficient vote to ensure that Labour is kept out of office. Consciousness lags behind events, and defeating the Alliance as well as the Tories requires that Labour demonstrates that all attempts to hold on to the post-war consensus are doomed.
The class polarisation is already beginning to do this. The Tories have fallen in behind the Tories over the Tebbit Bill, forcing even erstwhile supporters like Chapple and Weighell to label them as 'pink Tories'. The Falklands crisis has further clarified the willingness of the Alliance to fall in behind the Tories when ruling class strategy faces its biggest tests. High office can only serve to clarify minds still further. The local elections have resulted in SDP/Tory coalitions where the Alliance holds the balance in hung councils. As Ben Pimlott has recently written in New Socialist: 'Sir William Harcourt once said that the trouble with centre parties was that they were all centre and no circumference. The SDP is claiming 50,000 members after 4 months. This is a circumference of a kind; but whether its proportions are symmetrical is very much to be doubted. A large, and growing, right wing lop-sidedness seems virtually inevitable'. I would go further. It is in allowing the ruling class more time to pursue Thatcher's strategy, whether with Thatcher in the driving seat or without, that the Alliance is most likely to serve the ruling class.
According to John Ross however the ruling class is cooking up an alternative to Thatcher's project in the form of the Alliance. Should the Thatcher government fall 'amid mounting working class resistance' then the SDP/Liberal Allinace can offer a lifeline to the ruling class by forming a coalition with the Labour Party. This will be able to deal politically with the working class in a way that Thatcher cannot: 'Because it would bear the main responsibility for policing the policy (the incomes policy of the coalition), Labour would decline in popularity even more than the SDP in such a coalition, weakening the working class politically as well as economically'. Consequently a main task of socialists today is to campaign against any coalition with the Alliance.
How is it possible that the working class movement, fresh from waging struggles which have defeated Thatcher, could be so disarmed as to allow its leadership to throw away those gains in a coalition with the despised pink Tories of the SDP? It is here that it is necessary to deal with the most dangerous aspect of John's arguments.
A Politically Weak Working Class?
According to John, Britain's imperialist role and the resulting ability of the ruling class to buy off the working class created the conditions for the latter 'to become organisationally the strongest in the whole of Europe while simultaneously one of the weakest politically'. What he means by this is spelled out in his subsequent review of Britain in Decline: 'Hatred of the Tory Party is far deeper in the working class than either positive support for the Labour Party or any commitment to socialism'. It is this 'fact' which gives the Social Democratic Party its usefulness for the ruling class: 'The role of the SDP is precisely to fill the gap between the massive working class distrust and hate of the Tory Party and the much smaller section which actually supports Labour. By splitting the Labour vote, reducing it to a party with no perspective of forming a government, the SDP has the project of politically breaking up the traditional historic perspectives of the working class and opening the door for "Healeyite" economic policies to be pursued as the only alternative to Thatcher'.
This view of working class support for Labour is quite astonishing. It has nothing in common with the traditional position of our movement which views the creation of the Labour Party as a historic gain for the working class. It was the product of the desire of workers organised in trade unions to form a new party — independent of the capitalist Tory and Liberal parties — to represent their own class interests. This required a long and hard struggle to break the class collaboration of the emerging trade union bureaucracy who sought to pursue a 'Lib-Lab' political alliance against the Tories. The fact that the bureaucracy was able to determine the character of the Labour Party and impose its own reformist bourgeois programme and orientation in no way negates the tremendous gain in political consciousness the party represented.
Time and time again this political consciousness has reasserted itself: in the 1920s the bureaucracy only managed to assert its overwhelming dominance of the Labour Party after the defeat of 1926, with the final introduction of the individual membership structure and far-reaching bans and proscriptions. Even then, the road to direct collaboration with the capitalist parties in government was not open. Macdonald's split to form the National Government was met with a stone wall by the trade union bureaucracy who feared the consequences of endorsing such a policy with their own rank and file. Despite the wartime coalition and the leading role seen to be played in it by the Tories, the working class turned once again in 1945 to its party to provide an independent programme for government to ensure there was no return to the 1930s. Even at the height of the post-war boom, attempts to abandon Labour's specific constitutional commitment to socialism (Clause 4) were blocked by the union bureaucracy, again fearful of rank-and-file anger at any departure from the original objectives for which the Labour Party was built by the organised workers.
Perhaps these huge gains have been eroded during the period of post-war boom and prosperity. If this is John's view, where is the evidence? Far from there being a tendency towards disaffiliation from the unions, the fight for new affiliations especially among white collar unions is increasing. Nor can the Lib-Lab pact of the last government be said to signify acceptance within the labour movement of coalitionism. Rather than being seen as a pact to keep the Tories out, it was accepted as an agreement to keep Labour in — pursuing the same programme as it had embarked upon in 1975/6. Far from the working class moving to accept coalitionism, it began to struggle against Labour's programme in practice, resulting in the 'winter of discontent' and the massive upturn in strikes aimed at restoring living standards lost under the Social Contract.
Nor should we be misled by the decline in Labour's vote from 40.3 per cent of the electorate in 1951 to 28 per cent in 1979. First, it must be noted that this 40.3 per cent was Labour's highest ever share of the vote; Labour has never won all working class votes any more than the unions have organised all wage and salary earners. Secondly, the picture looks somewhat less dramatic if we look at the actual number of votes cast: at its high point in 1951, Labour won just under 14 million votes; in the last two elections it has registered just above and below 11½ million votes respectively. The Tories, on the other hand, won in 1979 with 13½ million votes — almost the same as 1951.
How is Labour's electoral decline to be explained? The voting figures themselves give us a hint. At the last election, the Liberals and other minor parties won over six million votes accounting for 14.9 per cent of the electorate; their electoral support has increased dramatically since the beginning of the 1970s. In my opinion, this is not to be explained by a weakening of class political consciousness. Rather it is to be found in the alleviation and obscuring of the depth of the crisis of British capitalism during the post-war boom. The British economy did grow far less than its competitors, but grow it did and with its growth came the post-war consensus of full employment and welfare provision. Not until the 1969 — and more dramatically 1975 — recession, was the ruling class forced to face up to the task of restructuring British industry and assaulting the working class.
Labour has still not come to terms with the passing of the post-war consensus although a growing minority of organised workers have drawn the lessons of the Wilson and Callaghan governments and are seeking to propel the party to the left. The SDP in alliance with the Liberals hope to launch themselves into office on a wave of fear, hesitancy and nostalgia: they hold out to the 'middle ground', the illusory promise of a return to the old, prosperous, and safer days of the boom. However, a short-term or even medium-term success in elections based on shifting, or rather polarising, electoral sands would not constitute a reversal of the historical gains of the working class, represented both in the strength of union organisation and in the adherence of the organised workers to a political party built and financed by themselves.
Proportional Representation
Proportional representation is offered as the means whereby the deep-seated distrust of coalitionism in the labour movement could be overcome. Under PR, Labour could not hope to win an outright majority of MPs whether it won 11½ or 14 million votes. It would have to enter coalitions, the argument goes, if it wanted to form a government. Furthermore, since the Alliance is almost certain to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament after the next election, and since the introduction of PR will be made by them a condition of any coalition, it is almost certain to occur. Through a neat constitutional and electoral trick, the gains of 80 years of working class political struggle can be wiped out!
In reality, it would require a transformation of the relationship of forces inside the working class movement for the labour bureaucracy to enter a coalition with the SDP to carry out anti-working class policies. The historical memory of 1931 is still strong; the memory of the Lib-Lab pact equally so. The bureaucracy's witch-hunt is proving incapable of stemming the demand for a shift to the left coming from the ranks. Unable to split off to the right for fear of walking into a political wilderness like MacDonald, yet unable to turn the tide in the party, the bureaucracy is increasingly divided within itself. Only a defeat of the workers' movement in open combat with the ruling class can reverse this process. Without the success of Thatcher's strategy, the SDP and PR can not be used to split the workers' movement with any success.
All this is not to say that PR will not be introduced. However, we must be aware that in and of itself it can not provide a substitute for the present Thatcherite strategy of the ruling class. Nor, for this very reason, is its introduction inevitable. The ruling class has many ways of preventing it, not least the House of Lords and the courts. They will be concerned which of the 57 varieties of PR is on offer; the Economist has already voiced concern that the Alliance may go for a system 'more likely to give Britain coalitions of the depressing Italian sort rather than the sober German sort,' Any proposal for PR will be judged according to how well it enables the ruling class to maintain a strong government to continue the strategy embarked upon by Thatcher, which also requires keeping Labour out of office.
A change in the pattern of two-party government established after the war is certainly on the cards. But the tendency to move in this direction is not conditioned by the failure of Thatcher, still less by the desire of the ruling class for 'flexible' government to carry forward the assault on working class rights and living standards. This tendency has already been seen in the government's response to the youth rebellions in the inner cities and the demands of leading police officers for better equipment and freedom from 'community control' in order to confront the rioters. It has been seen in the increased use of the courts to attack democratic rights — whether of councils to introduce cheap fares, or of the black community to organise for its rights. It has been seen in the use of departmental directives to undermine rights won by Act of Parliament by the women's movement, and in demands for increased press self-censorship during the Falklands crisis. The breaking of the post-war consensus requires the ending of the two-party system of alternating governments operating within that consensus. Strong governments, with increased powers for those sections of the state essential to carrying through an assault on the working class are essential to creating a new consensus out of the defeat of the working class movement.
It is yet to be seen whether the Tory Party can weather the strain of electoral unpopularity on the one hand, and the internal tensions of consolidating a leadership with this new orientation on the other. Whenever in the past the ruling class has turned to coalitions (the post-First World War years with the Liberals) or National Governments (1931 with MacDonald), the Tory Party has been able to swallow its partners and return to the helm as the party of government. Today, however, the stakes are far higher. Should the strain on the Tory Party prove too great, then coalitions/National Governments, not of the centre ground variety but of a new strong and reactionary character, may well be the outcome of the breaking of the mould.
For someone who puts great store by the capacity of PR to split the workers' movement, it is astonishing that John Ross not once offers any proposals as to what the response of socialists should be. In my opinion, we must reject the approach adopted by Tariq Ali in the Guardian, and echoed by others, which sees PR as the route to a 'New Model Labour Party' as the right wing jump overboard into coalition with the SDP. The suggestion that out of such a defeat — the working class divided by coalitionism — there can be a step forward for socialism in a new and more socialist Labour Party, is itself quite false. A look at MacDonald's defection of 1931 and the inability of the Independent Labour Party to overcome the demoralisation even within its own ranks should be enough to make us wary of such get-rich-quick schemes. But worse still is the suggestion that we should ourselves campaign for PR: the introduction of PR today would be nothing more than a manoeuvre to keep Labour out of office. It would certainly not be a step towards a more radical parliamentary democracy. Taken together with the continued role of an unelected House of Lords, the strengthening of the direct political role of the Courts, and the strengthening of police powers, it [is] obvious how hollow is the democracy of PR's Alliance supporters.
The Labour Bureaucracy
'If there were not a bureaucracy of the trade unions, then the police, the army, the courts, the Lords, the monarchy would appear before the proletarian masses as nothing but pitiful and ridiculous playthings. The bureaucracy of the trade unions is the backbone of British imperialism. It is by means of this bureaucracy that the bourgeoisie exists not only in the metropolis, but also in India, in Egypt, and in the other colonies.' To Trotsky's list of pitiful and ridiculous playthings one might add the Alliance and PR, though they would appear right at the very bottom, well below all the other paraphernalia of bourgeois democracy.
Today the bureaucracy maintains its position as the backbone of British imperialism by its capitulation in the face of Thatcher's offensive. Hoping that Thatcher will somehow collapse of her own accord, or that her unpopularity will secure her downfall at the next election, they hope to out-moderate the SDP in clinging to the post-war consensus. 'The Tory Party could still shoot their fox by dumping Mrs Thatcher. Only then would the Social Democratic parallel with Orpington man be complete; but the need for the Labour Party to pre-empt consensus would then be even greater', argues Denis Healey. The more the bureaucracy hold back from a fight (and in turn hold back the rank and file) the more workers become confused by mass unemployment and the ferocity of Thatcher's assault. The more they cringe before the government, the more the government drives forward — leaving them to find that their 'statesmanlike' bootlicking over the Falklands was a helping hand to the Tories in the local elections.
It is this, rather than a coalitionism which at present is no more than a twinkle in Callaghan's eye, which must be challenged in the labour movement. Mass Labour Party and trade union action to kick out the Tories remains the chief task of the day. Furthermore, it is this mass action, and the demands and policies thrown up in its course, which will shape a working class alternative to the post-war mould of Callaghan and Wilson and offer the reply to Thatcherism so sadly lacking from the bureaucracy. It is the movement against the missiles which has clarified the minds of those in high office in the labour movement — whether of Benn towards unilateralism, or of Foot away from it. It has been the limited but increasingly numerous factory occupations which have won broad acceptance of a woman's right to work and the need for a reduction of the working week to defend all jobs. So too, it will be out of the mass movement that the left will find the strength to repel the witch-hunt which will displace the phoney peace of Bishop's Stortford in the Labour Party — just as the unofficial movement against flexible rosters has crumpled Weighell's witch-hunting plans in the NUR. It is from the rebellious black youth that policies for positive discrimination and guaranteed jobs for school leavers will come. At the forefront of the mass movement beginning to fight against Thatcher will be — and already are — industrial workers and youth. It is to these forces that socialists must turn to resolve the present crisis of perspective in the labour movement.
References
1 'British Politics in the 1980s', International, Volume 6 Number 1, May 1981; 'The British Crisis', International, Volume 7 Number 1, January 1982; 'Does Thatcherism have a Future?', International, Volume 7 Number 2, March 1982.
2 Ross: 'The British Crisis', p24
3 Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe: British Workers and the Profits Squeeze, Penguin, 1972.
4 Glyn and Sutcliffe, p42.
5 John Scott: Corporations, Classes and Capitalism, Hutchinson, 1978.
6 CSE London Working Group: The Alternative Economic Strategy, CSE, 1980, p27. These figures do not include Japan and [therefore under-estimate] the huge influence of multinationals in the [world].
7 Ross: 'The British Crisis', p24.
8 Figures from Labour Research Department.
9 Andrew Gamble: 'Mrs Thatcher's Bunker; The Reshuffle and its Consequences', Marxism Today, November 1981, p10.
10 Tom Nairn: The Break-up of Britain, Verso, 1982, p391. 'Mrs Thatcher's "experiment" is no more than an attempt to utilise the recession to hasten and complete the dominance of finance capital. The apotheosis of "Freedom" is de-industrialisation: southern hegemony permanently liberated from the archaic [illegible] subsidies that prop [illegible].'
11 The Economist, 1 May [1982].
12 Ross: 'Does Thatcherism have a Future', p[illegible].
13 Gamble: 'Mrs Thatcher's Bunker', p10.
14 Ben Pimlott: 'When the Party is Over', New Socialist, Number 1, September/October 1981, p65.
15 Ross: 'Does Thatcherism have a Future', p10. It is worth noting in passing that after the Lib-Lab pact, Labour maintained its vote while the Liberal vote declined by about half a million. These and [other figures are] from H M Drucker (ed): Multi-Party Britain [...].
16 Ross: 'British Politics [in the 1980s]', p22
17 Ross: 'The British Crisis', p24.
18 The Economist, 1 May 1982, p35.
19 See Gamble: 'Mrs Thatcher's Bunker' for what seems to me a very credible analysis of the strains on the Tory Party. The conclusions he draws of a national government based on a centre [coalition], however, only seem likely in the context of a defeat for ruling class strategy.
20 [illegible]
21 Denis Healey: 'Consensus and the SDP', New Socialist, Number 2, November/December 1981, p27.
RICH PALSER is a member of the editorial board of International.