rprise to many people to and the SDP, Frank happle, and the right wing the AUEW supporting ans for coalition vernments and proposals break up the Labour arty.
But it may come as a ock to find the same line ing pushed by the heoretical and discussion urnal of the Communist arty' — as Marxism Today titled.
For four years now however arxism Today has been selesly campaigning for ecisely such a Labour-SDPeral coalition. It is the guiding read of all the key articles that pear in its pages. The latest stallment comes in the October we with long articles entitled abour's Lost Millions' by Eric obsbawm and 'The Popular hont Revisited' by David iscott. lajority The key article, of course, is at by Hobsbawm. He argues: i, at the next election, natcherism is everywhere posed by two or more ndidates competing for each hers votes, the Tories can look rward to being in power well to the 1990s. Some way of iting the majority of the British Socialist Action 28 October 1983 From this Hobsbawm concludes that, 'the issue of electoral unity will have to be faced'.
the same issue provides the 'historical background' to the familiar Marxism Today analysis. Priscott supposedly analyses the experience of the French and Spanish Popular Fronts before the Second World War -although somehow he fails to tell us the small facts that the Spanish Popular Front culminated in forty years of Franco's fascist dictatorship and that the French Popular Front collapsed within two years and was followed by the banning of the French Communist Party and the collapse of France amid the Nazi invasion of 1940. Legitimise Hobsbawm's line however now carries the analysis of the Popular Front to even more extreme conclusions. Those forces seeking to legitimise the SDP within the labour movement, to break the trade union's links with the Labour Party, and to put Labour in the coalition trap are not even the 'petty-bourgeoisie', 'middle classes', and 'antimonopoly forces'.
and its campaigns, are the monopolies themselves — although perhaps for the Communist Party they are the The David Priscott article in Thatcher.
The firms backing the SDP, ICI, Thorn-EMI, Beecham's etc are among the very largest and most powerful companies in The Financial Times and Economist are not journals of the 'middle classes' but two of the most authoritative, and proThatcherite, journals of British capital. The attacks of these journals on Thatcher have not been for going too far but for not going far enough.
All these forces of British capitalism understand that an SDP-Liberal-Labour coalition would be an unimaginable catastrophe for the Labour Party. Its policies would demoralise the Labour movement on a scale that not even the 1974-79 Labour government of Wilson and Callaghan could achieve. It would open the way for an administration far worse and more reactionary even than Thatcher's and under a relation of forces much more unfavourable to the working class.
A Labour-SDP-Liberal coalition would be a defeat far more crushing than anything the labour movement has experienced for fifty years which is precisely why ICI, Thorn-EMI, and the Financial Times favour it as an acceptable alternative to The CPGB has for long been known to its friends as 'Her Majesty's Communist Party': Eric Hobsbawm is evidently now in the running as the first ICI Professor of Marxist Politics'. AT ITS SALFORD conference this David pledged the SDP to be a 'social market' Anyone who of politics those words mean.
"Social market economy' was the phrase used by Margaret Thatcher to describe her own economic policies. It is the key term of Sir Keith Joseph's Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute for Economic Affairs. other monetarist supporters that inhabit British politics.
Owen has lost no opportunity to make his economic views known in the appropriate circles either. This October Economic Affairs, the journal of the Institute for Economic relaunched in a new expanded format. The Institute is an organisation set up 1950s monetarism al a time Margaret Thatcher Joseph had probably never heard of it.
It is the chief publisher in Britain of the pamphlets of Milton Friedrich Hayek, and also brings out works of Thatcher's personal economic adviser Alan Waters. The first issue of has its central article in its first issue Competition and Compassion by none Owen explicitly follows the -knows what Bae vser And all the books organisations Times Affairs, was for Policy campaign when even Sir Keith by Brittan Friedman, expanded Economic Affairs couraging right goir other than David Owen - his article is then followed by a round table discussion by four monetarists on his views.
Economic Affairs however is not the only publication in which a major new "dialogue' is opening up between the SDP and the monetarist theorists. One of the SDP's principal economic Nobel prize winner economics James Meade - has been publishing over the last years a series of on economic strategv. These have been consistently reviewed in the most glowing terms by the Financial chief economics commentator Brittan is the author of the first publication of Keith Joseph's Centre Studies and, through his Financial Times columns and books, is the man who has done probably more than anyone else to popularise the ideas of Milton Friedman in Britain Recently however this commentary on Meade's work has become a positive love-in. Writing on Meade's latest book Demand Management in the Financial Times on 20 October Brittan concluded, the Meade research programme is the most endevelopment in British macro-economics at the moment and it dwarfs in importance all the political