This is something I've meant to ask for a while but have never gotten round to it. I saw a BBCi article a while ago about how in contrast to the emotional battles that wracked Labour up until Blair, the French Left has always been solidly in favour of France's nuclear deterrent with only minor parties such as the Greens advocating unilateralism. So basically how do you make the British Left have a similar outlook with unilateralism only a fringe issue?
UK Labour never adopts Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament
- Thread starter The Oncoming Storm
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As Lord Roem is better equipped to tell you than I, the roots of the disarmament debate go back a lot further than 1983. You'd need to change a number of British people's minds the day Hiroshima was attacked, I think.
The Unilateralist movement was already gathering force by the time that Labour was kicked out of office in 1951. As it happens, I think that having Bevan elected to the leadership rather than Gaitskell would present the best way of the Party taking a middle path, rather than the internal brinkmanship seen between 1955 and 1961.
Nye was never opposed to the nuclear deterrent in the way that was seen in the 1960 Scarborough Conference by his erstwhile supporters, he had explicitly come out against unilateralism "sent naked into the negotiation room" upon his appointment as Shadow Foreign Secretary. Had he been leader at that point, what would have been seen is an increased demand for nuclear independence from America, Nye would have been able to sell that to the Trade Unions far more than the urbane Hugh did, which would have probably been enough to permeate that wing of the party well into the seventies.
Nye was never opposed to the nuclear deterrent in the way that was seen in the 1960 Scarborough Conference by his erstwhile supporters, he had explicitly come out against unilateralism "sent naked into the negotiation room" upon his appointment as Shadow Foreign Secretary. Had he been leader at that point, what would have been seen is an increased demand for nuclear independence from America, Nye would have been able to sell that to the Trade Unions far more than the urbane Hugh did, which would have probably been enough to permeate that wing of the party well into the seventies.
I'd love to read a good 'Bevan as leader' TL. It's also nice to see 'first name politics' happen long before Tony and Gordon...
That may be true, but the impetus for the formation of the CND in 1957 and extra-parliamentary mobilisation against the nuclear deterrent was exactly Bevan's shift to a more moderate position. If Bevan is leader and forced into a position of pragmatism then there is still going to be the same sense of betrayal and the emergence of unilateralism as a popular political issue.
Bevan is a wonderfully interesting person. I think his pre-mature death is one of the great tragedies for the Labour Party, he would have been the natural successor to Gaitskell had his health been up to it (obviously, he would have been leader for a time anyway) and would easily have beaten aside a challenge from George Brown and a token one from the left (Zilliacus probably) to end up with an even more secure position than Wilson did.
I may get around to something like this in a year or so.
Oh indeed, but CND was only able to get the toe-hold it did in the PLP because the Bevanites assumed that Nye would be supportive of it. The "betrayal" when he became Shadow Foreign Secretary was great, but he was already ailing by then, so most of them let it slide. Had he been able to shunt most of the PLP towards the centre ground, you're talking of only around a dozen MPs who are going to be against the deterrent, as opposed to the fifty or so of OTL.
What could happen is CND becoming a more pluralistic movement, rather than the Communist Front that it was perceived to be at the time. Bevan would be able to get a tighter control on the Trade Union leadership, so I doubt that the big leftward shift seen in 1959 would occur on quite the same level.