In its 115 year history, the Labour Party has won eleven general elections. Flickr/People before profit. Some rights reserved.The current Labour leadership contest has produced some unhelpful interventions. A sense of alarm, if not of panic, is clearly in evidence. There are those who are engaged in yesterday’s language concerning yesterday’s battles. Trotskyism as a pejorative has very little to do with the cultivated revolutionary leader whose exile and death all but destroyed the Bolshevik dream of a fresh start for humanity. The accusation of Trotskyism is often pitifully inaccurate. The ‘infantile disorder’ of left wing extremism is not to be confused with credible political vision. To slur principled practice is itself infantile, and has no place in serious politics, although it may be found yet on the lips of an exhausted liberal consensus.
In its 115 year history the Labour Party has won eleven general elections. The first eight were with programmes defined by the amended and determinedly Socialist constitution drafted in 1918. The famous 1945 victory set Britain on a Social Democratic course that was accepted by Churchill and his successors. Four of those elections were won under Harold Wilson’s leadership. It is a record unsurpassed by any prime minister and equalled only by Gladstone. Edward Heath’s attempt to reverse the Social Democratic development proved abortive. The Labour government of 1974-79, guided by the veteran union leader Jack Jones, set a radical course of social experiment that was only narrowly defeated in 1979 after a ferociously negative media campaign. The general expectation was that Monetarist economics would prove as disastrous as Heath’s free market venture of 1970. It was luck rather than strategy that sustained the Conservatives for a long time after their 1979 victory.
Intellectual and moral failure
So far so credible as a very brief summary. From these points we may conclude that a programme of a definitely Socialist character is what the electorate expects of a Labour government. There is plenty of evidence [the eight victories] to demonstrate that Socialist government can succeed by popular will, but will fail by the essentially conservative [if not formally Conservative] nature of popular media.
