Plausibility of Labour-Alliance Coalition in a 1983 Hung Parliamnet

[Deleted member 157939]

Hi guys. I’m thinking of writing a timeline in which the SDP-Liberal Alliance are able to form a Government in the 1980s. With possible PODs being Tony Benn winning deputy leadership of the Labour Party, the Alliance maintaining its initial momentum, humiliation in the Falklands or no Falklands war all together, assuming that it would be implausible for a total majority in the House, let’s envision that the Alliance gets a size able amount of seats, allowing them to become the second largest party in Westminster, or remaining third but with almost 10x more seats in OTL. Assuming that both the Conservatives and Labour Party do terribly, creating a Hung Parliament. How plausible would a Labour-SDP-Liberal coalition be, assuming that the Alliance does not split following the election?

Furthermore does anybody have any suggestions for Conservative MPs who could of defected to the alliance ?

 

[nezza]

Hi guys. I’m thinking of writing a timeline in which the SDP-Liberal Alliance are able to form a Government in the 1980s. With possible PODs being Tony Benn winning deputy leadership of the Labour Party, the Alliance maintaining its initial momentum, humiliation in the Falklands or no Falklands war all together, assuming that it would be implausible for a total majority in the House, let’s envision that the Alliance gets a size able amount of seats, allowing them to become the second largest party in Westminster, or remaining third but with almost 10x more seats in OTL. Assuming that both the Conservatives and Labour Party do terribly, creating a Hung Parliament. How plausible would a Labour-SDP-Liberal coalition be, assuming that the Alliance does not split following the election?

Furthermore does anybody have any suggestions for Conservative MPs who could of defected to the alliance ?

Highly unlikely. Many Labour left wingers regarded the SDP as traitors and wouldn't have stomached a coalition. Tony Benn would have resigned as deputy leader and may have formed a "Socialist Party" along side Heffer, Skinner etc

But all things being possible a coalition could hold. I guess Owen and Steel would want cabinet posts. As regards defections I can imagine Jim Prior jumping ship alongside Brocklebank-Fowler and at a outside chance Heath.

 

[Deleted member 157939]

Do you know of any other potential defectors from Labour? Do you have any idea where I can find a list of PLP members and how they voted in the 1981 deputy leadership electon?

 

[saluto]

It’d make the SPD look a little silly to have defected from labour only to prop them up in government. Maybe less formal support through a confidence-and-supply agreement would keep both happier.

 

[Coulsdon Eagle]

Many Labour supporters (me among them) blamed the SDP for Thatcher winning the '83 election, on the basis that, if we had stayed together, Labour would have had a more moderate manifesto rather than the longest suicide note in history, and not had the votes that would have won us the election "stolen".

Yeah, we did have delusions of mediocrity even back then!

 

[gaitskellitebevanite]

Do you know of any other potential defectors from Labour? Do you have any idea where I can find a list of PLP members and how they voted in the 1981 deputy leadership electon?

Ivor Crewe and Anthony King's 1995 book SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party is the bible of all things SDP, and gives a full picture of the internal and external struggles the SDP faced in the 80s, highly recommend.
The appendix features two lists of potential SDP recruits amongst the PLP, first those who rebelled with Roy Jenkins to vote in favour of EEC application in 1971:
Leo Abse
Peter Archer
Joel Barnett
Tam Dalyell
Ifor Davies
Dick Douglas*
Jack Dunnett
Andrew Faulds*
Ben Ford*
Roy Hattersley
Denis Howell
Alex Lyon
Roy Mason
Arthur Palmer*
Robert Sheldon
Sam Silkin
John Smith
Philip Whitehead*
Fred Willey

Second, a list of those in addition to the above list who were mentioned privately in interviews/speculated in the press as potential SDP defectors:
Donald Anderson
Betty Boothroyd
Ian Campbell
Stan Cohen
Donald Dewar
Alan Fitch
George Foulkes
Harry Gourlay
Brynmor John
Jimmy Johnson
Walter Johnson
Harry Lamborn (died August 1982)
Giles Radice
Albert Roberts
George Robertson
Shirley Summerskill
Tom Urwin
James White
William Whitlock
Alan Williams

Those above marked with an asterisk are those who were strongly suspected as likely SDP defectors, and would almost certainly have defected had Benn won the deputy leadership in 1981. Of all the non-defectors who didn't defect Philip Whitehead was involved in much of the initial 1979-80 backbench discussions about leaving the party but ultimately managed to find just enough reasons to remain (he lost his Derby North seat in 1983 anyway).
Others on the list were highly unlikely to defect, like Roy Hattersley and Tam Dalyell, and Robert Sheldon and Joel Barnett were strong Healey loyalists and would have been very unlikely to leave unless Healey did so - which he wouldnt have.

 

[Deleted member 157939]

Thank you very much !

 

[Politibrit]

There was a bit of a divide within the Alliance over who they would rather partner with if given the choice. For obvious reasons, the SDP were very sceptical of any arrangement with a Foot led Labour Party, and if Benn had a formal leadership position, I think the chances of that are zero. Steel was more instinctively anti-Thatcherite, and had a good working relationship with Foot, so would have probably preferred Labour if all other things were equal. I think the closest you'll get to a left wing Labour propped up by the Alliance at this time is the Liberals splitting with the SDP to give confidence and supply. But a more prominent role for Benn is going to make it very difficult for the Liberals to swallow.

Even then, you need to keep Thatcher or one of her close allies in charge of the Tories to keep them unpalatable to the Liberals. In a scenario where the Falklands are lost, then Maggie is probably gone, and replaced by Whitelaw or some other wet who both sides of the Alliance will be a lot more comfortable with, and will partner with over a Foot/Benn led Labour any day of the week.

In terms of Tory MPs who could have joined the Alliance, my book on the SDP (also the one by Crewe and King) says that Norman St John Stevas came to the brink of defecting, but pulled back, and it was also discussed by Stephen Dorrell, Hugh Dykes, David Knox, Keith Stainton, and John Wells. If it got to the point where the Alliance had displaced the Tories as one of the two major parties, I think you'd ultimately some of the big beast One Nation Tories like Ken Clarke, Heseltine, Prior, and Gilmour migrate towards them, similar to what we saw in France after Macron proved he could win.

 

[nezza]

There was a bit of a divide within the Alliance over who they would rather partner with if given the choice. For obvious reasons, the SDP were very sceptical of any arrangement with a Foot led Labour Party, and if Benn had a formal leadership position, I think the chances of that are zero. Steel was more instinctively anti-Thatcherite, and had a good working relationship with Foot, so would have probably preferred Labour if all other things were equal. I think the closest you'll get to a left wing Labour propped up by the Alliance at this time is the Liberals splitting with the SDP to give confidence and supply. But a more prominent role for Benn is going to make it very difficult for the Liberals to swallow.

Even then, you need to keep Thatcher or one of her close allies in charge of the Tories to keep them unpalatable to the Liberals. In a scenario where the Falklands are lost, then Maggie is probably gone, and replaced by Whitelaw or some other wet who both sides of the Alliance will be a lot more comfortable with, and will partner with over a Foot/Benn led Labour any day of the week.

In terms of Tory MPs who could have joined the Alliance, my book on the SDP (also the one by Crewe and King) says that Norman St John Stevas came to the brink of defecting, but pulled back, and it was also discussed by Stephen Dorrell, Hugh Dykes, David Knox, Keith Stainton, and John Wells. If it got to the point where the Alliance had displaced the Tories as one of the two major parties, I think you'd ultimately some of the big beast One Nation Tories like Ken Clarke, Heseltine, Prior, and Gilmour migrate towards them, similar to what we saw in France after Macron proved he could win.

Foot and Steel by all accounts had a very good working relationship during the Lib-Lab Pact so its plausible yet a COS arrangement might not be acceptable to some Liberals. It would be full coalition or nothing. Re the Tories. If Thatcher quit/was forced out then a wet would be a shoe-in.

 

[Derek Jackson]

If the Alliance did VERY well I think Labour might have sustained an Alliance adminstration

 

[jhenderson 20]

The general problem with this is that an Alliance doing well hurts Labour or Labour doing better limits Alliance votes. There is also the hostility which many Labour MPs felt, suffered even, when they that party from fellow MPs and joined the SDP.
Of course, its not impossible for this scenario to happen but it is no easy feat.
Two timelines I can think of have a similar-ish idea, well sort-of. Each sees Thatcher gone before an 83 or 84 election with different outcomes surrounding the Falklands (butterflied away or lost).
There is a timeline Joker in the Pack on this site: the SDP never join the Liberals and do well, but, IIRC, they join with the battered Conservatives in a hung Parliament.
The story Burn it all Down, on another site, has a Lab-Alliance (Libs and SDP) coalition. It eventually falls apart after six months or so, with the SDP too eventually siding with Conservatives and an eventual Socialist Labour Party in later years.

 

[Merrick]

The problem for any centre party is that they tend to have no heartlands and not much of a core vote. In the UK, this is compounded by the electoral system - in the 1980s, out of ~600 seats there were 150+ where the proverbial donkey with a red rosette could have won and a similar number of true-blue Tory strongholds. That doesn't leave much space for a centre party to come through the middle - to get to even 100 they'd need to take seats from both the other parties and that's hard to do if the election is seen as a straight choice pro/anti Thatcherism.

Even if Thatcher goes before the election, if the Alliance vote gets close to a discredited Conservative party then Labour has probably walked the election and if they cut deep in to the Labour vote then the Tories have likely got a landslide (as they did OTL). Their best hope is to get ~50 seats and hold the balance of power in a hung parliament. That won't produce an Alliance government, so they have to decide who to support. While Steel might have been able to work with Foot, I can't see the SDP leadership agreeing to prop up a government led by the people they've just revolted against, so that leave two possibilities:
- Foot falls on his sword, and a more moderate Labour leader (Kinnock? Healey?) forms a government with Alliance support
- The Left keeps control of Labour, and the Alliance props up a minority Conservative government under a "wet" like Whitelaw, Heseltine or Clarke
Either way, the Alliance has to work out how to avoid either getting absorbed by their major partner (as the Liberal-Unionists and National Liberals were) or thrown to the electoral wolves (as the Lib Dems would be).

If the Alliance goes with Labour, the SDP probably gets absorbed back in short order, particularly if there's a Tory resurgence. If they go with the Tories, I suppose I could see the coalition evolving into something like the German CDU, possibly with a rump Conservative party as the CSU? Or there's the Holy Grail of proportional representation, which hits the practical problem that even at a low point Labour and the Tories have 2/3 of the votes and 80% of the seats between them, and neither is likely to support a change that would make the Alliance into perpetual kingmakers.

Somewhere there's a timeline where Labour goes back to its roots as a working-class trade union-based party and that opens a space for the Liberals/SDP/whoever to emerge as the socially-liberal, technocratic, pro-European party with a support base among university graduates and the urban middle-class, but I can't see how that happens with a POD in 1983

 

[Politibrit]

The general problem with this is that an Alliance doing well hurts Labour or Labour doing better limits Alliance votes. There is also the hostility which many Labour MPs felt, suffered even, when they that party from fellow MPs and joined the SDP.

I don't think this is a huge issue. The Alliance also took a lot of votes from the Tories-actually more than from Labour when they were at their peak in the polls. What's more, Alliance took largely from Labour's middle class vote, which has always been more dispersed across the Tory seats they are less likely to win, but which may have become vulnerable to the Alliance if they were having a very good night. So I actually think Labour would be more resilient to an Alliance surge than the Tories would be-the red wall still being solidly red gave them a very high floor.

Really, that makes a coalition of the kind the OP wants harder-if Labour and Alliance are the two largest parties in a hung parliament, then the latter will be far more interested in a deal with the Tories as it would likely mean they get one of their own as PM.

 

[Another Steven]

Hi guys. I’m thinking of writing a timeline in which the SDP-Liberal Alliance are able to form a Government in the 1980s. With possible PODs being Tony Benn winning deputy leadership of the Labour Party, the Alliance maintaining its initial momentum, humiliation in the Falklands or no Falklands war all together, assuming that it would be implausible for a total majority in the House, let’s envision that the Alliance gets a size able amount of seats, allowing them to become the second largest party in Westminster, or remaining third but with almost 10x more seats in OTL. Assuming that both the Conservatives and Labour Party do terribly, creating a Hung Parliament. How plausible would a Labour-SDP-Liberal coalition be, assuming that the Alliance does not split following the election?

Furthermore does anybody have any suggestions for Conservative MPs who could of defected to the alliance ?

I would have thought a Conservative alliance coalition more likely, thought could not imagine Mrs T staying on to lead it.

 

[JDGiant]

Highly unlikely. Many Labour left wingers regarded the SDP as traitors and wouldn't have stomached a coalition. Tony Benn would have resigned as deputy leader and may have formed a "Socialist Party" along side Heffer, Skinner etc

But all things being possible a coalition could hold. I guess Owen and Steel would want cabinet posts. As regards defections I can imagine Jim Prior jumping ship alongside Brocklebank-Fowler and at a outside chance Heath.

Many Labour right-wingers did too. The right represented by the likes of Roy Jenkins was quite a different animal to the right represented by Denis Healey and others who stayed in the party. The former was more pro-EEC and more liberal (Jenkins himself, according to a book on Liberal/centre party leaders, was said to be a old school early 20th century Liberal in his politics). Healey and Jenkins were said to have never gotten on with each other.

 

[Galba Otho Vitelius]

There is another way to do this, which I think is more plausible.

Have the Labour right, not the Labour left, maintain control of the party. This violates the OP specification of a Labour-Alliance coalition, because there is no Alliance. The SDP is not formed, but the Liberals on their own recover from their 1979 performance (hurt by Lib-Lab and Thorpe), and Labour led by Healey or someone like him narrowly edge out the Tories, without getting a majority.

I ran this scenario through the UK election predictor using the 1983 boundaries, and got this, which is an indication of what could have happened with this scenario:

Labour
38.3% 307

Conservative
37.5% 306

Liberal
17.0% 13

The predictor generated 4 seats for the SNP, 3 for Plaid Cymru, and 17 Northern Ireland seats without breaking them down, but lets argue the SDLP got 3 of those.

So Labour and the Liberals have 320 seats combined, not a majority, but they get over the top after deals with Plaid and the SDLP, they don't even have to bring in the SNP.

It obviously would not have broken down quite this way, but I think another Lib-Lab coalition is workable. A Labour -Alliance coalition after the SDP split, not so much.

 

[Galba Otho Vitelius]

Labour -Alliance is not ASB but pretty unworkable, and earlier commentators have pointed out the problems.

The main one is at some point you need to screw the Thatcher government, to get the Tory vote percentage at least into the low thirties. Doing so replaces Thatcher with Whitlaw or someone like him, probably before the election, or at least once the election results come in. Both parts of the Alliance would find it easier to work with such a figure than with the Labour left (Foot was actually supposed to be a compromise candidate, but it didn't really work out). If part of the POD is greater Labour left control, the dynamics get even worse.

 

[Politibrit]

There is another way to do this, which I think is more plausible.

Have the Labour right, not the Labour left, maintain control of the party. This violates the OP specification of a Labour-Alliance coalition, because there is no Alliance. The SDP is not formed, but the Liberals on their own recover from their 1979 performance (hurt by Lib-Lab and Thorpe), and Labour led by Healey or someone like him narrowly edge out the Tories, without getting a majority.

Yeah, a right wing Labour leadership at this time certainly makes this a lot easier. I actually do think we'd still see an alliance (of sorts) in this situation, as Jenkins was set on the creation of a new centre party regardless of whether Healey won. The Gang of Three would stay in Labour, but you'd probably get a smaller Jenkinsite party forming an alliance with the Liberals.

The other scenario that doesn't fulfill the terms of the PoD, but might work better, is to have the Alliance propping up a Kinnock led Labour government after '87, though you'd probably require a PoD before 1983 to get a hung parliament.