Arthur Scargill learns something useful from the miners strike

joemac

The premise of this is that Arthur Scargill learns from some of the mistakes of the miners strike and as a result the socialist labour party is a lot less sectarian and more inviting to lefties who have been alienated from the Labour party. As a result the socialist labour party manage to poll in the 1997 general election get 8% of the vote, mainly in the more left wing labour constituencies and get about 12 MPs. Significantly they cause labour to lose to other parties candidates in other consituencies forcing a hung parliament
The results are as follows
1997 general election
Labour 36% 310 seats
Conservatives 30% 240 seats
Lib dems 18% 55 seats
Socialist Labour 8% 12 seats.
As a result of this the lib dems go into coalition with Labour with the promise to switch to single transferable vote. The lib dems don't get this but instead get an AMS system like in Scotland with a 60:40 split between first past the post and proportional representation respectively. With the socialist labour party doing well at the expense of Labour Tony Blair is forced to adopt a more left wing stance.
 

Orville_third

Banned
Hmmm...one wonders what will result from this after Iraq...Or even if Blair will support an invasion of Iraq...or even a Desert Fox (If he faces pressure from the Socialist Labour Party, Old Labour or the Lib Dems- and/or if he is convinced by Hussein Kamil's revelations, the US may go it alone in Iraq in 1998...with the attendant global and US domestic backlash.)
I also wonder if this Blair will be less of a fan of Clinton...
 
Magniac

Magniac

joemac, the Leftwing Brits on this site will tell you that Scargill changing his authoritarian ways is a major handwave.

Also, by 1997 there was a great fear of another majority Tory government. Splitting the centre-left vote even more with the addition of another high profile nationwide third party (8% is very good, that's what the Greens in my country get) would only come about if somehow the fear of more Conservative rule wasn't the driving force on the non-government side of politics.
 
Cook

Cook

Banned
Since it is a First Past the Post electoral system even if they pole 8% nationally that does not equate to 12 seats; it equates to no seats unless they can get the largest number of votes in a particular seat.

Hence the Greens in Australia are currently on about 8% but will be lucky to get a single Lower House seat, even with Preferential Voting, which is far better for minority parties than F.P.T.P.
 

Arachnid

The only place the Scargillite party might have a chance is in one or two super-super-super safe Labour seats with noted modernisers with poor community relations. With 8% of the vote and assuming its reasonably spread out I'd be astonished if Socialist Labour get one or two seats, anything more requires either radical demographic change, massive working class disengagement from Labour (not true in 1997) or a scandal hitting the Labour candidate, like being caught buggering a kid the day before the election.
 
V-J

V-J

Scargill was a deluded Communist megalomaniac with aspirations of being a British Lenin or Mao. There is no way he would have tried to create a broad-based left-wing party, anymore than he did in OTL, (the Socialist Labour Party is/was the Arthur Scargill fan club) and no reason to believe it wouldn't have failed as the SLP did historically if he could have.

The left had already split disastorously in the eighties, and nobody, but nobody, wanted that to happen again. The Referendum Party only got 2.6% of the vote in 1997 when the Tories were happily tearing themselves apart over Europe and there was genuine appetite in some quarters for an anti-EU alternative. How exactly do you expect the SLP to get more than three times that when Labour was singularly focused on beating the Tories and fully united for the first time in decades?
 
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