THE NEWS that David Owen is standing down at the next election is just a footnote to the death of the SDP.
The time when the SDP-Liberal Alliance was way ahead in the opinion polls, and Roy Jenkins won a spectacular victory in the Hillhead by-election, septis near veals away those claims 'breaking the mould' of British appear defunct; the Liberal Democrats are no more significant than the Liberals before the SDP was formed.
So was David Owen's whole project a failure, just another ailed attempt to create a new major party, as insignificant as Oswald Mosley's 'New Party in the early 1930s? In fact, David Owen's political project was highly successful in helping to shape British politics in the Gang of Four The SDP was formed as a right wing split from Labour in 1981; the Gang of Four' Owen, Shirley Williams, Roy lenkins and William Rogers formed the SDP as a direct reply to mite left. Their plan was surge of the 'Bennité' that the polarisation between a Thatcherite Tory arty and adical left Labour Party woul create the space for a powerful centre party. But it was not to be.
The plans of leading politicians are one thing, the plans of the opinion formers in the ruling class are another. So long as Labour appeared to haveturned left for a whole historical period, important sections of bourgeois opinion accepted the need for a revamped three-party system.
The Alliance served the purpose of keeping Labour out of government, since the 'normal' alternation of the Tories or right-wing Labour in could not be relied on. But once the Labour left was defeated, a very strong centre party was no longer so immediately indis pensable for the ruling class.
What in the end defeated the 'three-party' plan for British politics was the complete victory of Kinnockism in the labour Party. The Kinnock-Hattersley 'dream ticket was elected in 1983.
Union chiefs
Behind their victory, and be hind each successive rightward Labour move since, has stood the power of the trade union bureaucracy, desperate to prove to the ruling class that Labour was 'fit to govern'.
While Bennism swept the constituencies until the middle of the 1980s, the union block vote ensured Kinnockite control of the conference and NEC.
At a superficial level it seems that labour movement politics is back to the situation of the late 1950s. Right wing. trade union barons dominate the key unions, the Labour Party has a strong right-wing leadership and the left is marginalised.
But the general political conext is completely different. The crisis of British capitalism is much deeper, and so is the crisis of Labour.
David Owen is in part responsible for Kinnockism, but it is a very tragile outgrowth. Politically it is virtually devoid of ideas and incapable of distinguishing itself from Major's Tories. The one idea i does have is to get into power.
Right wing
In this situation it has two possible futures. Either it will succeed in getting into power and result in the most rightwing Labour government ever, or it will lose the next election, and eventually Kinnock will go.
Either way, the many Labour and union activists who have kept their heads down, convinced that compliance with Kinnockism was the only practical policy, are going to be sorely disappointed.
The next British government will result in Tory policies ap plied by Major or Tory policies applied by Kinnock. That will create a situation in which the How Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell depicted the early SDP apparent log-jam of British politics will be broken.
The dominance of Kinnockism and its union 'new realist counterpart is based on the defeats suffered by the unions in the 1980s. The labour move ment is paying the terrible price Defeat of the miners, the printers, the dockers and other groups of workers.
While the immediate aftermath of an election will begin to iS A DEAD - I THINK HE's A VERY TROTSKYiST REASONABLE MAN!!
S'TRUE, produce a political recomposition inside the labour move ment. a break with the basic dominance of the right can only be the result of a recovery in the class struggle.
Nobody can predict exactly how and when that will come, but come it will. New struggles will unlock the situation in the Labour Party.
Kinnockism is a product of defeats and can only sustain itself on defeat and quietism. That is why it is an episode and not a LiKE ME ARE JOiNiNG THE S.D.P.!! E BRAVO! major historical trend in British politics; the basic historical trend is towards a deepening crisis and thus major new class conflicts.
David Owen is retiring to the side lines, but the ruling class still has the Liberal Democrats as a reserve force in the wings. Stable two-party politics in Britain was the result of relative social and political stability, and that has gone for ever. The SDP is defunct, but multi-party ruling class politics has not.