Britain's fragmented and forlorn Centre parties

Press, 28 September 1988, Page 20

Britain's fragmented and forlorn Centre parties

Robin Lustig, news editor of the “Observer,” analyses the pitiful state of the Centrist opposition to Mrs Thatcher

AFTER NEARLY IO years of Thatcher rule, it is only natural that some people in Britain are beginning to wonder whether the country will ever get a chance to sample an alternative mode of Government. In last year’s General Election, which returned Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives to power for the third successive time, there were some voters who could remember no other Prime Minister in their life-times. The Conservatives’ traditional rivals are the Labour Party, which governed Britain between 1964 and 1970, and again from 1974 to 1979. Since then, however, the Left-leaning party has been embroiled in crisis after crisis, and there is little sign even now that it is yet in a position to pose much of a threat to Mrs Thatcher. So what other alternative is there? Sandwiched between the two main blocs there used to be something called the Liberal Party, a small Centrist group which used to have a handful of M.P.s in the House of Commons but never made much of an impression on the national political scene.

They were joined in 1981 by another Centrist party, the Social Democrats, founded by disillusioned former Labour Party leaders including the one-time Home Secretary and former European Commission President, Roy Jenkins. And that’s when life — in politics, at least — started to get complicated. The Social Democrats formed an alliance with the Liberals. It didn’t work. So after the last election, they decided to merge. There’s now a party called the Social and Liberal Democrats. But, to ensure continued confusion, there’s also still a party called the Social Democrats, made up of people who diddn’t want to merge with the Liberals. Chaos reigns supreme. Unsurprisingly, the British public is unimpressed by all this messing about, so the prospect of a “new alternative” has remained unfulfilled. Yet there is one man who by sheer force of personality has managed to keep the dream alive: his name is David Owen. He is a handsome, debonair, charismatic figure who seems to inspire devotion and disdain in roughly equal measure. He was, briefly, Foreign Secretary in the Labour Government headed by James Callaghan in the mid--19705, and he now leads what is left of the original Social Demoprats.

He has been compared vari-

ously to the late American President John F. Kennedy, and, less flatteringly, to the 1930 s neoFascist British politician Sir Oswald Mosley. He is ambitious and determined — some say arrogant — and he refuses to accept that the centre ground in British politics is too fractured to offer a sound base for a glorious future. He is a fascinating, if ambiguous, political phenomenon. He admires certain aspects of Thatcherism — its emphasis on personal responsibility, for example — while opposing its apparent lack of concern for the socially deprived. He heaps scorn on his former colleagues in the Labour Party, particularly its non-nuclear defence policy, which he regards as a recipe for

disaster. Yet his relatively high personal standing is not translated into support for his party. British voters do not like voting for parties which seem to have no chance of actually winning an election. “I agree with a lot of what he says,” say Mr and Mrs Average Voter, "but I don’t see the point in voting for him because he’s never going to get into Downing Street.” According to the latest opinion polls, his party — now usually know simply as Owenites to avoid confusion with the Social and Liberal Democrats — is supported by a mere 3 per cent of the electorate. This compares with around 9 per cent for the S.L.D. and a total of more than 25 per cent for the Liberal-Social

Democrat alliance at the time of the 1983 General Election. It does not look encouraging. The prospects, therefore, are bleak. For the foreseeable future, British politics will continue to be dominated by the Conservative and Labour Parties, at least until such a time as a system of proportional representation is introduced, under which each party would be awarded seats in the House of Commons according to how many votes each won, rather than by a system of first past the post as at present. Under this system, the party which wins most votes in a constituency wins the seat, and everyone else gets nothing. Even if the centre parties came second by only a couple of

votes in every constituency in the country, they would still end up with no seats in Parliament. It means, in effect, that a small party has next to no chance of making a significant impact. So it is scarcely surprising that Dr Owen (he was formerly a physician) has now decided that electoral reform must be a top priority for his devoted band of followers. Although he clearly has justice on his side, I fear that as long as the present system works so overwhelmingly to the benefit of the two big parties, he has precious little chance of-achiev-ing the change he needs. Copyright — London Observer Service.