Losing from the Inside

Cost of Conflict in the British Social Democratic Party

Patricia Lee Sykes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351317382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on the consequences of internal conflict for electoral competition and demonstrates why the Social Democratic Party (SDP), in alliance with the Liberals, "lost from the inside" during two general election campaigns in Great Britain.

1
Introduction

In 1979 Roy Jenkins called upon his followers to strengthen the weakening center of British politics. His message was simple but stirring: the time was ripe to reconstruct social democracy from the ruins of polarized politics. The people, Jenkins said, must forge a new political force. He would recruit his troops from the ranks of the politically alienated, urging “people of talent and goodwill” to escape the pessimism of the past and join the new campaign. The old order was depleted, he charged, bankrupt, a victim of bad faith and false promises. The future, as Jenkins saw it, lay with the new soldiers of the center who, spurred by a “sense of cohesion and common purpose,” were sure to serve the public good.¹

Formed two years later, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was a young political party, but it was never a new political party. In March 1981 the four founders of the SDP—Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams, and William Rodgers—announced that they would “break the mould” of British politics. The Social Democrats objected to the strife-ridden, adversarial nature of the British two-party system. In public statements they promoted an alternative approach intended to replace partisan class conflict with a new progressive consensus. In fact, they resurrected an older British tradition of advocating moderate social and economic reform to be achieved through gradual change and based on cooperation.²

According to the Social Democrats, the people themselves would initiate and direct the desired change in a truly participatory and democratic internal party system, organized on the principle of one person, one vote. Furthermore, multiple checks and balances within the party structure would secure against “the passions of politicians who might seek to dominate,” in the words of the MP who drafted the original party constitution.³ In theory, the Social Democrats used Madisonian tools to construct their party organization;⁴ in practice, however, they built their party structure on a theoretical foundation that could not support the weight of political ambition. Two years after the birth of the SDP, the constitutional framer said that his experience in the party confirmed what he already knew about political organizations, that it is difficult if not impossible “to control the passions of ambitious politicians.” Ambition does not always counteract ambition.

More important for the purpose of this study, the history of the SDP reveals a third paradox. The party’s founding members, wishing to escape the internal wrangling and bitter conflict of Labour, gave birth to a party that ultimately fell victim to internal squabbling. At the Labour Party Wembley conference in 1981, the electoral college reform institutionalized the strength of left-wing groups and convinced many Social Democrats that the ideological struggle within Labour would persist and intensify. According to the authors of the Limehouse Declaration, the SDP’s founding document, “The calamitous outcome of the Labour Party Wembley Conference demands a new start in British politics.”⁵ Free of ideological burdens, the Social Democrats hoped to establish and maintain a unified, cohesive party. They wished to prove to the electorate that political parties could avoid internal quarrels and focus on broader, more important objectives. In his 1979 speech Jenkins recommended the following to social democrats in the Labour Party:

The response to such a situation, in my view, should not be to slog through an unending war of attrition, stubbornly and conventionally defending as much of the old citadel as you can hold, but to break out and mount a battle of movement on new and higher ground [emphasis added].⁶

In principle, the Social Democrats did wish to “keep politics out of politics,” as their critics mocked.⁷ In reality, their accomplishment fell short of their idyllic aim. The Social Democrats disappointed the hopes of many when SDP leaders proved to be, in the words of one party official, “less than a bunch of shining saints.”⁸ Their experience suggests that ideology is not the only (nor the primary) source of internal trouble for a political party.

Unusual as it is in some respects, the SDP, studied alone or in conjunction with its Liberal partner,⁹ sheds light on the nature and consequences of intraparty conflict. The experience of the SDP shows how the character of internal party politics can shape (and be shaped by) the external electoral environment. Indeed, the British Social Democratic Party demonstrates why and how a party can lose from the inside even when it competes on the outside in the electoral arena. In doing so, the SDP defies the classical model of responsible parties in Great Britain and also challenges the dominant, contemporary concept of parties and their functions in Western democracies.

The “Literary Theory” of Parties

“On all great subjects, much remains to be said,” Walter Bagehot commented in his classic nineteenth-century book, The English Constitution.¹⁰ Even today, much remains to be said on the subject of political parties. Bagehot’s remarks on the English Constitution in the 1800s apply to political parties in our own time:

The literature which has accumulated upon it is huge. But an observer who looks at the living reality will wonder at the contrast to the paper description. He will see in the life much which is not in the books; and he will not find in the rough practice many refinements of the literary theory.¹¹

In the twentieth century a “literary” understanding of the nature and form of political parties plays a crucial role in political analysis. Many who study electoral competition today depict parties as cohesive units or “teams,” building on the assumptions of Joseph Schumpeter, whose work marks a departure from the study of politics within a party to the study of politics between parties.¹² Previously, both Ostrogorski and Michels explored intraparty politics and discovered that leaders use democratic arguments to promote their own standing.¹³ Democracy could not exist in the country because it did not exist in the party, Michels concluded, and therefore an organization’s tendency toward oligarchy promised democracy would never emerge.

In the modern literary theory, however, this “iron law of oligarchy” becomes irrelevant. An important element of representative democracy survives because the scramble for votes compels party leaders to respond and appeal to public sentiments. The electoral process serves representation and ensures responsiveness when one leader of each party directs a unified team of followers in the struggle for power.

To explain why party policies converge during an election, Anthony Downs refined the literary theory and developed its implications.¹⁴ According to Downs, parties shift from both the left and the right toward the center to maximize voting appeal. Like Schumpeter’s earlier view, the Downsian economic theory of democracy presupposes that parties are single units or cohesive teams that follow rational calculations in response to electoral demands. Critics of the Downsian model usually question Downs’s use of a single left-right dimension.¹⁵ More important, Downs underestimates the ability of certain individuals or factions within a party to steer policy away from the center and toward extremes.¹⁶ Most relevant to this study, Downs does not consider parties as flexible groups of individuals with different and often conflicting aims and interests.

Of course, not everyone follows Downs in his neglect of intraparty pluralism, but even those who do observe the complexity of internal politics frequently fail to suggest that it interferes with the economic understanding of electoral competition. Consider the two classic studies on politics within British political parties. Robert McKenzie sees the essential struggles taking place between leaders and followers, with the elite dominating both the Conservative and Labour parties.¹⁷ Samuel Beer, on the other hand, observes factional conflicts only in Labour, where one leader with a band of followers rivals the leader of another troop.¹⁸ Despite the two scholars’ basic disagreement on the nature of conflict, they reach similar conclusions about its consequences: for both, conflicts cease when electoral competition begins.¹⁹ Neither author suggests that intraparty divisions have serious repercussions for representation in Western democracies. If parties are not always simple units, they become so when forced to confront a political adversary during an election.

Why should we pay more attention to the nature and consequences of intraparty leadership conflicts? When can the literary theory prove misleading? Although it may be an extreme case, the 1983 British general election illustrates vividly the myth of unified parties. According to Schumpeter’s reasoning, the competition should have been among Michael Foot (Labour), Roy Jenkins (SDP/Liberal Alliance), and Margaret Thatcher (Conservative). In reality, each official leader confronted rivals in her or his own party. James Callaghan and Denis Healey defeated Foot; David Owen and David Steel challenged Jenkins. Even Thatcher did not direct a unified team. During the election campaign, Francis Pym warned the electorate against a landslide Conservative victory,²⁰ which might enable Thatcher to enact extremist policies. With the confidence that comes from a landslide victory, the prime minister sacked the rebel in her ranks immediately after the election. Nevertheless, Pym continued to battle from the back benches, and the press designated him “leader” of the only effective opposition to the “Iron Lady.”²¹

Furthermore, in the 1983 general election the parties did not make similar appeals to the electorate. According to Downsian theory, the two major parties should have responded to evidence of declining electoral support by returning to the center, thereby restricting Alliance electoral gains. Instead, they maintained distinct programs, while Labour shifted even further to the left.

In short, the literary theory of political parties as cohesive units often fails to match the complex reality of electoral competition. Even if individuals within the parties make rational calculations, the aggregate effect may be “irrational.” The electoral behavior of British political parties in 1983 cannot be explained without reference to intraparty politics. In particular, the economic model fails because competition among the elite within each party did not cease during the actual election.

The myth of parties as cohesive groups limits more than the economic approach to the study of political parties. In general, parties are defined in ways that fail to recognize diversity or conflict. Many political observers view parties as groups of individuals united on the basis of issues²² or as sections of the electorate that vote in a particular way.²³ In the tradition of political sociology, parties are often associated with mass social or economic movements, usually class.²⁴ Observers tend to assume a degree of solidarity that does not exist in reality. Political scientists may be willing to admit that parties are not always cohesive units, but many maintain a contrary analytic assumption in their scholarly work, especially at the macropolitical level. Even when they do describe parties as loose, fragmentary organizations, they usually do not consider this condition when examining electoral competition.²⁵

A basic philosophical dilemma may help to explain why political scientists tend to engage in a type of doublethink, depicting parties as cohesive units in theories of electoral competition while simultaneously recognizing the fragmented, complex nature of party organizations in reality. In contemporary scholarship a tension exists between the concern to protect individual rights and the desire to secure “popular” or majoritarian influence. When political scientists observe group activity or elite conflict within an organizational or institutional framework, they can derive comfort from the knowledge that pluralism permits diversity and debars the ultimate supremacy of one person or one group. Nevertheless, when they explain electoral competition, they describe parties as vehicles for popular choice. Electoral outcomes can be interpreted as public preferences or mandates only if parties represent something singular, either a coherent policy program or a particular leader. In modern democratic theory the legitimacy of the electoral process rests on the notion that the majority decides who should govern. Without this notion, popular rule proves a hollow concept. If parties are units, then both the electoral choices and the results are clear. If parties fail to perform as teams, then the majority is unable...