THE Democratic Party brought down to earth with a bang last week. Its main problem was not the parconference a spectacle paid to its much vaunted image as a party above internal dispute.
plagued une SDP unavoidable decision it had to make to vote for the Tebbit anti-union bill. By dexterous footwork, the SDP has so far avoided taking stands which bring it into collision with the trade union bureaucracy. However, the class struggle finally caught up with it.
The vote for Tebbit revealed the real objective of the SDP: to provide a safety net for the Tories ensuring that their attacks will persist into the next parliament. Even if the majority at the next election votes to throw Thatcher out, the SDP are offering themselves as a junior partner in a 'national government'.
The SDP has taken a systematically antiwithout policy is only a nait truin. leaders have furiously Leyland workers, they have denounced the given vociferous support to the Common Market and the British 'deterrent' railworkers, and they espouse a host of other reactionary causes.
It didn't need the vote on the Tebbit bill to know where they stand. budding 'gang of four' in the Duffy, Chapple, Sirs - have been forced to attack the SDP SDP's virtues in his union journal, was forced Sirs, w10 was to describe them now as 'nothing more than pale pink Conservatives' This is a body blow to the SP and why the party split three ways in the Commons vote.
All those involved in the leadership battle are agreed that their task is to divide the Labour movement from top to bottom. The present electoral success does not even go half way. A rather bigger job is required. has to break some of the unions from the Such a task cannot be done breaking the back of the organised Labour movement The SDP's problem is the failure of Thatcher to date to succeed in this. The Tories and the SDP are not alternatives. They are terrible For the SDP to be of lasting significance it depends on the working the SDP's direction.
Hattersley declared last weekend that the Labour Party should seek to destroy the SDP.
Good. But if this is to be a serious rejection of coalition with them, not enough.
The SDP policies which Hattersley and others spout out have also to be rejected and the SDP fifth column inside the Labour movement moved from any position of influence. If the Labour leaders took such a road then the SDP marginalised.
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Socialist Challenge 18 February 1982 page 2 OVER THE PAST ten days it has become perfectly clear that LabourS right wing has no intention of respec'truce' in the party. On the contrary: the witch-hunt against the left is going to continue.
Last weekend Roy Hattersley, ing to a meeting of the Labour Solidarity spent his left in the most vitriolic terms. Witch-hunt goes on
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ty's precipitate decline in the opinion polls. Nor was it the series of defeats for the leadership at its first constitutional
working class stand ever since its formation. The Tory media's jibe that half trusa. SDY
prior defeat. Meanwhile, however, the class struggle doesn't wait. Choices willy nilly have to be made. This is why there is a battle over
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