POD 1993, make it happen. Bonus points if Blair's leader. Double Bonus if it happens when they're in power and a Tory minority government is formed as a result.
UK Challenge: Old and New Labour split
- Thread starter RogueBeaver
- Start date
Post-1993, well New Labour is going to be in charge, the old guard still held quite a few positions on the NEC etc. but once John Smith is gone (he was a compromiser in the Wilson mold more than a reformer), they simply have no steam left. This means 'Old Labour' doing the split and this I find virtually impossible. Tony Benn is left of some of the fringe Socialist 'X' Parties but still a Labour Party member, simple fact is loyalty mixed with a little cynical awareness of the need for a mainstream party means I really can't see it happening. I hate when people dump on AH ideas but this one is extremly unlikely given the POD, the only way if could happen would be for Old Labour to be forced out, a second-wave of purges. Problem is once you've got rid of the Trotskyites, the far-left of the party are primarily Trade Unionists- even Blair at deity level wouldn't get away with it.
Also even if this happened taking the 1997 figures as a measure, I doubt the New Labour rump govt. would really fall to the Tories, at worst a coalition with the Lib Dems.
Also even if this happened taking the 1997 figures as a measure, I doubt the New Labour rump govt. would really fall to the Tories, at worst a coalition with the Lib Dems.
Orville_third
Banned
1995: Hussein Kamil tells the BBC what he told CNN.
1998: Tony Blair joins in with Bill Clinton in "Operation Desert Fox" as in OTL. Unlike in OTL, Old Labour protests severely...
1998: Tony Blair joins in with Bill Clinton in "Operation Desert Fox" as in OTL. Unlike in OTL, Old Labour protests severely...
It could I suppose have happened over Clause IV, a lot of people tore up their membership cards over that and then realised they had no where else to go. Scargill founded the Socialist Labour Party which at it's brief peak in (I think '96) did have thousands of members, including entire ward and constituency Labour branches that went over to them, and promptly left after a conference dominated by mental Trots and even madder Stalinists, not to mention King Arthur pulling out the Cheshire Retired Miners Association's block vote to beat any motion he didn't like.
So maybe a saner, slightly more moderate SLP could have been sustainable but it would have required intelligent and tactically aware leadership, and Scargill could not have provided that at this stage, it would have needed a couple of high profile back bench MPs to join, who could have out manoeuvred him.
It would have inevitably gone the way of the SDP, got disappointing election results after loads of attention and effort (thanks to FPTP), and probably ended up falling apart, merging with the Greens or falling into obscurity like OTL, but after a bigger effort, and temporarily higher profile.
If Labour had got in in '92, then I just don't think a significant split could have happened in '93, people would have known how lucky they were and would not have wanted to upset the apple cart.
So maybe a saner, slightly more moderate SLP could have been sustainable but it would have required intelligent and tactically aware leadership, and Scargill could not have provided that at this stage, it would have needed a couple of high profile back bench MPs to join, who could have out manoeuvred him.
It would have inevitably gone the way of the SDP, got disappointing election results after loads of attention and effort (thanks to FPTP), and probably ended up falling apart, merging with the Greens or falling into obscurity like OTL, but after a bigger effort, and temporarily higher profile.
If Labour had got in in '92, then I just don't think a significant split could have happened in '93, people would have known how lucky they were and would not have wanted to upset the apple cart.
I remember reading Blair-sceptics in the nineties condemning that breakaway party as being bit of a mad cult. At least they (the SLP) got some attention, though. A leading Australian Leftwinger called Bill Hartley tried to form a Progressive Labor Party in response to the 'Hawke-Keating hijack' of the teh workers party back in the eighties only to have the effort be condemned to obscurity.
Though '97 was the election when Billy Bragg was begging Labour and Lib Dem voters to 'exchange' their votes with people who lived in other constitiuencies, depending on which local party had the stronger non-Tory candidate. I just can't see another major Labour split occurring so as to allow the Nasty Party to continue in power, what with the eighties split having been such a godsend to the Nasties in the first place. 'Make it happen' is a bit too handwavey in this scenario. Eighteen years was enough.
Anyway, isn't there a direct line from Scargill's party to the movement Galloway has had around himself?
If that's the case then 'sane, moderate, breakaway socialist party' might be structurally impossible.
(And I'll bet my left leg that the introduction of PR to British politics would see the Greens become the dominant Left 3rd party, as is the case in Oz, NZ, and to some extent in most European countries.)
Nope, the SLP still exists and is entirely independent of RESPECT, though I'm sure there are veterans of the SLP in RESPECT (gluttons for punishment obviously).
This is just not going to happen under normal circumstances. Labour had split once in living memory - disastorously - and had split in 1931, disastorously. In consequence, there is one thing burned into the mind of every Labour member - if you split the party, your are both stupid, and evil. So splitting the party is inconoclasm of the highest order.
The only way you could come close to this is through coalition with the Lib Dems, with a gradual ever closer union between them and New Labour, which was what Blair was always angling for.
The only way you could come close to this is through coalition with the Lib Dems, with a gradual ever closer union between them and New Labour, which was what Blair was always angling for.
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No chance, while the Cooperative Party is an extremely interesting phenomena (the fourth largest party in parliament and most people have never even heard of it) it would never - ever split, it is not an especially leftwing party and it's fate is bound up with Labour's, they couldn't survive a split. I suppose if you had PR the Coops might merge with the Greens, but that is ASB in my opinion.
I have to admit, I had never heard of this, or at least I'd forgotten about this phenomenon if I had. (Were these the people interested in taking lessons from Pierre Poujade's small merchants association in the fifties? I read somewhere that that controversial Frenchmen was invited to speak at either a Labour or TUC conference during that era, but I can't find any reference to that on the Net. Poujadism is mostly known now as a reactionary movement, yet it was started as an independent booksellers union.)
Wiki says the retail cooperatives are small supermarkets. This sounds a bit like the Australian SDA, one of the dominant Right union factions in both tradehall and ALP politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operative_Party
They may have expressed a small interest in the Poujadists I don't know.
I wouldn't say they are either of the right or left they span both wings of the Labour Party, they support the cooperative movement however, and to be a member you have to be a member of a coop and a member of the Labour Party.
Confusingly Gareth Thomas the Coop Party Chair is a Labour MP, but not a Labour Coop one.
They may have expressed a small interest in the Poujadists I don't know.
I wouldn't say they are either of the right or left they span both wings of the Labour Party, they support the cooperative movement however, and to be a member you have to be a member of a coop and a member of the Labour Party.
Confusingly Gareth Thomas the Coop Party Chair is a Labour MP, but not a Labour Coop one.
Wiki has a good page about the coops structure in the British high street economy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operative_Group. I'm familiar with mutual societies, credit unions and farmers coops in this country, but I never knew they were so big in the UK small supermarket business. Over here these independent retail outlets are mostly family owned.
This appears to be a much more successful management/shared ownership culture than 'industrial democracy' has ever been in Anglo societies (though I have heard people overemphasising the pivotal nature of workplace corporatism to What The Left Should Be/Has Been; because it's a great dream for some intellectual Leftwingers to import European power sharing systems, regardless of, well, the reality of their failure to take root in the English-speaking democracies. You haven't lived until you've had a social sciences lecturer--who's probably never worked anywhere near a factory--tell you how factories should be run. I have worked in a factory, and I know how they're run in the real world. But I digress.)
The SDA in Australia went with the militantly anti-communist DLP in the fifties split. However, that was mostly because the DLP retained the loyalty of the most Catholic unions, and the 'shoppies' have always been dominated by Irish Catholics (they weren't even particularly engaged in any fight against communists at the time. They were just aligned with the most tribal RC Labor pols, for cultural reasons more than ideological ones.)
Not impossible but perilously close to ASB - but is more feasible than a New Labour/Socialist Labour split. Nobody flocked to Arthur Scargill's banner in 1997.
Except thousands of Labour party members, including former councillors, and candidates and several union leaders (most of the RMT leadership, the ASLEF leader, the baker's union leader etc) did actually either join the SLP pretty quickly, or hang back to wait and see what happened. They fled pretty quickly admittedly because it was mental, but it could have been more popular. Whereas the Coop Party has never even hinted at any desire for a split.
Oh god no the Coops aren't splitting, their 'ideology' if it can be said to have one is dedicated to private industry on a medium/small level with employee control/influence: this really doesn't fit into the overly simplistic Left-Right divide, arguably they're left of neo-liberalism but they very much anti-nationalisation, anti-BBC (state monopoly), pro-PPP (as a starting block) etc. If anything they might find common ground with the Greens or Liberals but Labour is broad enough to keep them comfortable.
Really if we're looking for a split by the Left, take the old Turtledove formula and have the SDP stay in 1981, eventually modernise the Party and cause an SLP analogue to crop up by the early nineties.
Eh, Labour is a strange beast quite different from most left-centre parties, its members can be very totemic which is the reasons dated ideas hung around for so long and also why the defeated Far-Left still attend Party meetings.
A timeline idea I've been looking into for a while is Callaghan winning a 1978 General Election, leading to Labour dealing with the 'Winter of Discontent'. It would all get rather messy and Labour might be out on their arse for much the 1980s but no SDP split, no Militant dominance etc. I'm not confident how realistic it is but if by the late 1980s Labour has turned around a lot quicker, a Left-wing split is possible, Callaghan not Thatcher being the TUC's daemon being crucial to this. Still I doubt such a group would even achieve SDP numbers, although if Unions did swing away a few heartland seats might be near run things, or even fall to the Tories in 3-way splits.
Really if we're looking for a split by the Left, take the old Turtledove formula and have the SDP stay in 1981, eventually modernise the Party and cause an SLP analogue to crop up by the early nineties.
Eh, Labour is a strange beast quite different from most left-centre parties, its members can be very totemic which is the reasons dated ideas hung around for so long and also why the defeated Far-Left still attend Party meetings.
A timeline idea I've been looking into for a while is Callaghan winning a 1978 General Election, leading to Labour dealing with the 'Winter of Discontent'. It would all get rather messy and Labour might be out on their arse for much the 1980s but no SDP split, no Militant dominance etc. I'm not confident how realistic it is but if by the late 1980s Labour has turned around a lot quicker, a Left-wing split is possible, Callaghan not Thatcher being the TUC's daemon being crucial to this. Still I doubt such a group would even achieve SDP numbers, although if Unions did swing away a few heartland seats might be near run things, or even fall to the Tories in 3-way splits.
If the gang of four go & join in with the Kinnock-through-Blair reform process what is the added incentive for a Leftwing split?
The problem is splitters who stay and join one or other of the factions don't look like the splitters we would otherwise know them as. Couterfactuals are what we use to figure this out.
You do know that when the Gang of Four left Labour, the Party fell under the control of Militant due to its powerful influence over Unions and the grassroots? If there is no split the Right is a lot stronger and reforms might begin years earlier, without a Neo-Troskyite leadership taking control in between. There will certainly be a major internal battle and per the OP's basic intent, this could lead to a still powerful Left-wing splitting off to form their own party in some fashion.
IOTL the Left was only neutered by constant political defeat in elections and an internal crack down. If you have a more dominant Right-wing that can force the Left under control you might have parrallel to our SDP with the dominated faction breaking off in disgust over the Party's direction.
Eh? Not entirely sure what you're getting at, figure out what? Look like what? Other factions? Do you mean parties or internal factions in Labour?
That's a big call to make.
Militant Tendency were big, but I've never read of them either being or truly running the entire Left.
Jape said:
That is not unresonable, though I have to reiterate that I disagree about there ever having been an actual Neo-Trotskyite leadership at either Westminster or on the NEC.
Though the appearance of that very creature existing obviously was a real phenomenon. The John Cleese TV ads for the Alliance really should be up on Youtube--it would be instructive to look back on such a reasonable centre-Left chap telling the voters that the Labour Party was pro PLO.
Jape said:
Don't take this the wrong way, I was only reacting to the fact I had no idea what your scenario is about in any detail.
I just assumed you believed that the SDPers remaining in the Labour Right would make that faction look like OTL's Social Democratic Party, not the faction of the Healeys and Browns.