The Labour Party and the Future of the Left

Abstract

In the months to come we will, no doubt, have to argue many times in public that the 1983 general election was not as significant a landslide as Margaret Thatcher will continue to claim. We will need to stress over and again that her popular vote actually fell, and that of those who voted, 57.6 per cent actually voted against her. We might even, to sustain ourselves in difficult times, explain away the Labour Party's dismal perforrnance by remembering the treachery of a Callaghan, the disloyalty of a Chapple, even the vote-splitting impact of a perfidious Alliance. But there will be no getting away from the fact that the election constituted a massive defeat for the Left as a whole, a defeat from which we will have to recover, and a defeat whose origins lie deeper (and whose causes are more structural) than these easier explanations and rationalisations will allow. Indeed if the Left is to recover-if history is not to come on us once as tragedy and twice as farce-we had better be honest now: about the weakness of the Left as a whole; about the problems of the Labour Party in particular; and about the dangers which will face us if we do not draw very radical lessons indeed for strategy and policy from the Thatcherite victory and her 144 seat majority.