ories in turmoil plenty of them in the streets of eastern Europe; and even the possibility of a Labour government in Britain.
Clearly, Labour's new-look electability is in a large part due to the poor performance of the Tories. Problems have been piling up for Thatcher: not just the electoral defeats, resig nations, internal rows and public sniping. It goes deeper than that.
At the root of Tory troubles is the crisis in the economy. The Goverment's ability to buy off, sell off and mortgage bits of it, and to ride public opinion with a confident (if not coherent) ideology, determination and short-term bribes, has been key to their success. The Conservatives shaky cconomic strategy enabled them to build a sound political base: the most important element of which was the employed skilled workers who became (or felt) better off as a result of tax cuts and sales of council houses and shares, along with lower inflation.
The Tories are now very close to losing that base as the problems stored up by their own policies are unfolding. The options for the government are suddenly much narrower -
sons, so the actual figure for non-payment at this time is certainly over 20% and may be almost 30%. This compares with a figure of 10% for non-rates payment at this point last year, forcing Strathclyde Leader Charles Gray to comment 'this is very disquieting'
Indeed it is. Having failed to lead any meaningful opposition to the poll tax, Labour now face the stark reality of trying to enforce Thatcher's hated law or using mass resistance to say enough and no further. This tax, quite simply, is a total failure.
While the right-wing revel in their postunilateralist support from sections of the bourgeois media there seems little chance of them supporting mass non-payment. Quite the reverse is likely. From the Campaign Group, and above all Benn, we expect better.
The launch of the Socialist Movement at this year's conference in Chesterfield potentially represents a major step forward, bridging the gulf between socialists inside and outside the Labour Party. However, the skeleton must develop flesh and muscle. In Strathclyde region alone hundreds of thousands have said "stuff Thatcher's poll tax" and are now looking for a clear political lead. This represents the largest disobedience movement in British politics for over 50 years. Where will the Socialist Movement stand?
Jim Niblock witness not only the sharp rise in interest rates as inflation and unemployment start creeping up and the balance of payments deficit worsens, but also the veiled hint made in John Major's first Autumn Statement that taxes will be held or raised next spring. With the realisation that the money's run out and the game's up, panic is beginning to set in.
The crisis in confidence has already cost the government £5.5bn in extra public spending for next year: the first real increase for 6 years in the share of national output taken by public expenditure. The alternative, of doing nothing and waiting for an uptum to bring the voters back, is much more risky. An uptur isn't likely to come before the next election. Even the government have admitted that at least for next year, the economy will get worse. Lawson clearly anticipated as much and got out before more of the blame came his way.
Significantly, Major's Autumn Statement proposals included a E2.4bn increase for the health service in 1990-91 (that is not enough to maintain existing levels of service, but just a bit less than the Labour Party called for and SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 20, Dec-Jan 1989-90
JUPE «ув.
Make Budget Day NHS DAY I/Defe Hithe N Bitterly unpopular: the Tories' new NHS 'reform' Bill promised if elected). That price they're clearly prepared to pay to defuse opposition while they push through their NHS Bill - a fundamental political attack on the NHS.
With such virulently unpopular measures as the NHS 'reforms", water and electricity privatisation and the poll tax still to push through, many Conservatives in parliament are depressed and worried about hanging on to their own seats, even if their party manages to retain an overall majority at the next election. It's in that context that the question of Thatcher's leadership takes centre stage.
The polls tell us many contradictory things about public opinion in Britain. We hear, for example, that concern about unemployment is still high (second on most people's lists), and that they have no confidence in the government's policies for reducing it - but 57% still think that most unemployed people could get jobs if they tried. Most people favour higher taxes over cuts in public spend. ing. whilst at the same time the polls tell us that a majority agree with Thatcher's diag nosis of the problems of the welfare "dependency culture'.
But one of the clearest conclusions to be drawn from recent polls is about attitudes to Mrs Thatcher herself. She is massively un popular - even more unpopular than her party. The Tories know that and seem reluctantly to be gearing up to do something about it.
Following Lawson's resignation, telephone poll found that only 24% of voters were satisfied with Mrs Thatcher's performance as PM. That gives her the lowest popularity rating of any prime minister since polling began in 1945. The only rival to her all-time low was Harold Wilson, who held the previous record: a mere 27% satisfaction with his performance in the heady days of May 1968. Increasingly, Thatcher is seen to be out of touch and contemptuous of people. That, of course, she always has been. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 20, Dec-Jan 1989-90
FEATURES E Stog the
Bidding for the leadership? Heseltine to be "losing control' - a weak spot indeed for been her main, if not only, selling point. a to resign if elected for a fourth term is understandable: it underwrites her fundamental unpopularity with a guarantee that she will be the dividends of her three-times tested voter appeal just one more time. But it's a risky economy overshadowing any advantage her leadership style once gave her, but ovemight she is now seen as a political has-been. Her ordinary
Tinto the breach.
Make Budger Day NHS OUR DAY EALTH ERVICE RE What's more important is that she is now seen a leader whose strength and decisiveness has In that context her "post-Lawson' promise ness. going soon (promise) in the hope of reaping move. Not only are other problems in the those circumstances. Tory rivals, as well as Labour, are keen to step
Some Conservatives are well-placed to do that. The "succession" is already the ob ject of much coded competition and jockeying for position. As we go to press Michael Hesel. tine is openly revealing his am- bition to step into Thatcher's shoes, while the possibility of a "stalking horse" challenge for leader is still being debated - if only a volunteer could be found. With a leadership chal- lenge will go a political chal- lenge. This is where it could really begin to get interesting. Waiting in the wings in the Tory Party are the silent majority: the non- Thatcherite, 'one nation". party loyal Tories. A recent academic study of the Conservative Party, which for the first time ex- amined and grouped the politi- cal position of cach Conservative MP. found that less than 20% of them could be described Thatcherites. Around the same number are fully fledged wets, whilst -the biggest grouping - over half of all the Conservatives in parliament - are just party faithful. Politically. what kind of successor emer- ges is at the moment up for grabs, since among the obvious contenders there are candidates of category, each and Graeme Cookson some of the wetter, like Heseltine, are the more popular electorally (22% of voters who ex- preference press favour Heseltine to take over after Thatcher.) Whether or not Heseltine himself is the chosen sucessor, the outcome of the issue at the heart of his difference with Thatcher - ad- vocating a German/European economic and defence alliance for Britain in place of the cur- rent "special relationship" with the USA - will be key for the prospects of British big busi- Who is chosen will depend in a large part on what are the circumstances of Thatcher's departure, and who, ideologically and in- dividually, is best placed to take advantage of All this makes the prospects for the Thatcher revolution after Thatcher shaky. Ul- timately the test of the project is in the perfor- Paqe 11
'Unaccustomed as / am'- Engineers' leader Jordan addresses a mass meeting, calling for strike action! themselves at face value and in fact
mance of the economy and the satisfaction of capital with that performance. More monetarism, uncomfortably combined with public spending sops to the wets and the voters doesn't look too convincing if you're a big business mogul worried about interest rates, wage demands and inflation, and getting frozen out of European markets because Thatcher thinks there are more votes in banging on about British sovereignty.
Unless the Conservatives find solutions to the current crises (and the even bigger ones looming over the horizon) and deal with those problems - and deliver the votes - then capital will be forced to begin to look elsewhere. If Thatcher, even with her promise to go, has rendered the Tories as a whole unelectable, the net will have to be thrown further than the Tory wets for a safe bet.
During the 1980s, of course, the centre parties have been bolstered as a fall-back. But plans in politics don't always go like clockwork and other, unpredictable factors like personalities and party members have stepped in to almost wipe the centre off the map.
Enter Labour. Whilst capital is a long way from seeing Labour as a potential partner, it is wary enough to look on it a little more kindly these days. At the very least Labour could serve if not as a fall-back, then as a fall-guy for the impending economic collapse stored up by the Tories and the recession that must inevitably follow. The political options are not so desperate as to drive the capitalists into the hands of our obligingly moderate Labour Party, but they could certainly live with watching Labour struggle with their crisis and watching it fail for five years - as it inevitably must - giving capital's forces time to regroup and recoup.
Sadly, although Labour might find itself as a hapless beneficiary of Conservative decline and capitalist crisis, it is not so well prepared in its own bid for power.
So far, it has made very little political capiPage 12
FEATURES tal out of the Tories' bankrupt policies and politicians.
Although Labour now leads the Tories by an average of 10 points in the polls, a closer examination reveals that this has been almost exclusively as a result of a drop in the vote for the Democrats and lately the Greens - with little inroad into the solid core of Conservative support. This remains around the 35% mark -poor enough for a party of govemment, but substantially better than in 1981 when they were down around the 28-30% mark, and in 1985 after the end of the miners' strike when they dropped to a low of 24%.
On the brighter side, Labour's lead has been steady since the summer - giving it a longer-term advantage, a feature new to the pattern of its previous mid-term leads. But unless the party manages to chip away at core Conservative support, especially in a time when interest rates are high, and inflation and unemployment rising, then its prospects don't look too good.
Labour's new package of policies makes it less, not more, electable. It is simply not up to the challenge of what is a real shift in the mood and political temper of the electorate -which is decisively away from the values and economics of Thatcherism, but not yet distinctively pro anything else identifiable.
Labour has saddled itself with policies which take on board the more "acceptable" abstracts of Thatcherism, propose little else by way of policy framework or specifics, and leave the rest well alone.
In the middle of all the turmoil that may yet bring more seventies revivals, one feature of the Thatcherite eighties - the art of selling - remains. How else does Labour, so easily written off not so long ago, suddenly become this week's best buy? It's the way you sell *em.
We do - and to some extent, think - what we're told. Sadly politics works a bit like that too. And just as capital tends to accumulate
Tand centralise, so too does political opinion. At least, that is, "informed", "authoritative" - establishment - political opinion. They all say more or less the same thing. If they say it often enough, then other people say it too. It starts to sound like fact. It's a handy thesis, and it serves Labour's leaders well. It gives them the justification for a series of revisions which gut the movement of its momentum and potential for power. It offers a self-fulfilling vision of a party whose es sence is a nondescript, calculated lowest common denominator rhetoric, just a lot John Harris of hot air to fill a vacuum with. Its im-
mediate benefit for the likes of Kinnock is that such a strategy serves to shore up their own personal standing and security in the party. The trouble is they also take seem to buy the whole line that it will get them into Number 10,
Not so. Unfortunately they don't seem to have noticed that the Alliance, the last party to take hold in the centre (with 50.5% support in its heyday) sunk there and disappeared almost without trace. That's not to argue, of course, that Labour doesn't need to win over a majority to its policies. Clearly it does but the only way to do that, and to hold support for any length of time, is with a series of policies which can deal with economic problems convincingly, and which don't penalise the working class in the process. Those policies aren't available off the peg from the centre. If Labour is to be more than a passive, short-term beneficiary of Thatcher's unpopularity. then it must have something more substantial to offer.
Even tired old Marxism Today is waking up to that fact. There is some satisfaction, even if petty, to seeing Eric Hobsbawm struggling through an article in its pages describing Labour as the alternative to the Tories now that his beloved friends in the centre are out of the race. "The Thatcher spell', he announces pretentiously, "has been broken." Many, but unfortunately not most, in the labour movement were never under it. The likes of Marxism Today succumbed all too quickly and grabbed too desperately at the centre as a way out - and dragged too many along with them as well.
Hobsbawm announces that at least Labour will not now frighten the voters off with the likes of Benn and Scargill, but asks, plaintively, if Labour can manage to inspire them enough to win their votes. Sadly, the answer is probably "no". Some of the responsibility for that lies with the likes of him, for acting as a block on attempts to do that very thing, and for peddling old compromises under the guise of "new times'. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 20, Dec-Jan 1989-90
Labour Party Conference 1989: elsewhere in Europe votes for social democrats are holding fir The F