Edit: Sorry, I really like your TL's, Fletcher, and I probably shouldn't be so critical!
The point surely is though that an attack of 'homophobia' isn't going to be taken seriously
I agree - and as you say, a big point here is that local government was seen as (justifiably in many senses) a very bad issue for Labour in the 80's, so they generally avoided kicking up much of a fuss on these issues, or at least did not do so until they were implemented and public opinion on the issue crystalised; in consequence, the Tories got a relatively smooth ride in the early stages of things like the Poll Tax.
Kicking up a big fuss on Section 28 would win Hattersely a lot of applause on the liberal/left of the party, but it would all too easily tie into a 'Loony Left Councils' narrative for the Tories to exploit. That may be 'worth it' for internal party-political reasons, but it wouldn't win Labour votes.
With regards to the rest...I wonder if there might be some difficulty on the pact?
Agreed - I am also sceptical that Labour would start these kinds of negotiations so soon after the demise of the SDP, and especially under 'old right' figures like Hattersley and Smith, who were never more than lukewarm on this kind of thing - when there were talks about probable coalitions etc in the run up to the '92 election, it never really got beyond the 'back of a taxi' stage.
I think there is a shade too much of the New Labour period being anachronistically applied here. The Lib Dems were not even polling significantly after the merger to warrant this kind of thing from a purely opportunistic perspective really anyway. There was a lot of expectation that the Lib Dems might even just die off before the next election in the 1987-1990 period.
Certainly, if this gets out to the wider party, Hattersley is buggered. Withdrawing full support for Labour candidates in preference to the almost moribund, not to mention 'traitorous' Lib Dems? Probable - no, delete - resigning issue if it gets out. Christ, not even
Blair went this far at the height of his 'consultation' phase. The party just wouldn't buy it.
If there was a rapprochment with the Lib Dems - which I'm not totally hostile to as a concept - then it would be very tentative, very informal, reasonably low-level, and very short-term at this stage.
Incidentally, if you want to do a
really interesting divergence in this period regarding the Lib Dems, then I'd somehow have the SDP remnant win the 1989 Richmond by-election....
In regards to Hattersley not modernising the party, wasn't Hattersley from the right of the party whereas Kinnock was from the soft left?
Yes, that is quite true, which makes their later development so ironic - perhaps I should clarify. Hattersley would still press for modernisation - expulsions of militant etc - it just wouldn't be the proto-New Labour, Peter Mandelson-style all-power-to-the-leader modernisation which we saw under Kinnock and which was only interrupted historically by John Smith's leadership.