The Shambles Left by "Sunny Jim"

By Bonnie Angelo

Torn by dissension, the Labor Party looks for a new boss

His voice and face strained with emotion, former Prime Minister James Callaghan, 68, summoned members of the Labor Party shadow cabinet to his office in the House of Commons one afternoon last week to announce what some of his colleagues had wanted and others had feared. After 35 years in politics, Callaghan was stepping down as head of the Labor Party in favor of a new leader "who will bring fresh vigor, fresh authority, unity and purpose."

A champion of consensus and compromise, Callaghan leaves a party racked by an internecine war between its right and left wings. His own right wing was savaged by an advancing militant left at the party's annual conference at Blackpool earlier this month. Resolutions were passed that would commit the party, if it returns to power, to taking Britain out of the European Community, and would undermine the Western alliance and NATO by unilateral nuclear disarmament and a ban on U.S. cruise missiles. Along with pressing a series of draconian policy changes, the left captured vital parts of the machinery that controls the party. The schism is now so deep that it raises the possibility of a breakup of the 74-year-old Labor Party, an event that would have profound effects on Britain's political system.

Even as his lieutenants stood to applaud Callaghan's announcement, they were thinking ahead to the race for succession. Callaghan still tops the polls as Britain's most popular political figure, besting Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher 47% to 38% in a survey released last week. Within his own party, however, he is a spent force, little more than a pawn in the struggle for control. Dispirited since Labor's defeat at the hands of the Tories in May 1979, and exhausted by his party's constant infighting, he had hoped to reverse the rising power of the party's left extremists and turn Labor over, united, to a successor in his own mold. His presumed choice: former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, 63.

Healey is the front runner to succeed Callaghan, but he must now fight for the post in two rounds. At the Blackpool conference, Labor's militant left, managed to change the way the party selects its leader, the potential Prime Minister. That privilege has always been exercised by Labor's members of the House of Commons--the Parliamentary Labor Party (P.L.P.). The left pushed through a proposal for a new electoral college made up not only of M.P.s but also of representatives of local committees and delegates from trade unions. Whatever ratio of membership is adopted at a special Labor Party conference on Jan. 24, the radical left will have grabbed a piece of the right's power.

The new system put Callaghan at the center of a political paradox. Leftist M.P.s who had opposed him suddenly entreated him to stay on until the electoral college was in place. M.P.s of the right, who had been his mainstays, demanded that he quit immediately while the P.L.P. could still put a moderate in his shoes. After tantalizing uncertainty, the bruised Callaghan sided with his old allies. They, in turn, vowed to resist the new system. Declared Shadow Defense Secretary William Rodgers: "It should be said loud and clear that the conference cannot instruct the Parliamentary Party. Labor M.P.s will be free to choose their own parliamentary leader." The left countered with a blunt warning: "If the P.L.P. insists on holding a full election in defiance of the recent conference decision, this will be regarded as a declaration of war." Undaunted, the M.P.s scheduled their first ballot for Nov. 4. As many as three left-leaning members may challenge Healey (see box).

The long-range threat of an irrevocable split in the party lies in the radical policies adopted in Blackpool. Although the move to take Britain out of the European Community has broad public appeal, former Education Secretary Shirley Williams threatened to leave the party if it campaigned on a pledge to pull out of Europe without a new referendum. She warned that a sizable number of M.P.s would go along with her.

The Blackpool votes favoring unilateral disarmament and a ban on U.S. cruise missiles and nuclear submarines also created dissension. One M.P., Neville Sandelson, said afterward that he would vote with the Tories on defense matters: "I do not accept the dictates of authoritarian left-wingers who see the Parliamentary Labor Party as the last democratic bastion in the way of their gaining power. We are the voice of the people. They speak for the Blackpool rabble."

Some rightist M.P.s wanted to break away immediately after the conference. "Let them [the leftists] have the name and the headquarters," argued one M.P. privately. "We could be the Independent Labor Party." Waiting in the wings to encourage those sentiments is Roy Jenkins, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary who is returning to Britain in January after four years as president of the European Commission. Nevertheless, splinter groups have fared poorly in the past, and rebelling M.P.s are not likely to form one now. Nor is there any move among Labor's dissident moderates to join with Britain's middle-of-the-road party, the Liberals.

The radicals have made great gains in the Labor Party in the past 18 months. So long as Labor was in power, Callaghan could hold together his coalition, whose cornerstone is the trade unions, which usually prefer the status quo. But as soon as Labor was relegated to opposition, the left moved to strengthen its position. It was aided by a complacent right, smug in its control of leadership, which did little to counteract a well-planned takeover of the party at the grass roots. Although Labor polled 11 million votes in the last election, its party membership is a meager 220,000 at most. It was easy enough for young activists to gain control of the small, moribund party organizations at the constituency level.

It became painfully clear at the Blackpool conference that Callaghan's celebrated skill for behind-the-scenes persuasion was no longer working. The comforting byword "Jim will fix it" had turned into hostile criticism of "Jim's fudge and nudge." Callaghan came to politics out of the trade union movement and had always counted on the union leaders, who tend to be nonideological, to keep the party on a comfortable center-socialist course. But this time the unions could not fall in behind him because they were beset by their own left-right split--shop-floor militants vs. traditionalist leaders.

The Labor Party has long lived with its left wing in Parliament; 70 of its 268 M.P.s are members of the so-called Tribune Group, named for a leftist newspaper. The "radiclabs" from the grass roots are a different breed; proudly Marxist and in some cases revolutionary Trotskyists. London's Communist Morning Star boasted after the Blackpool conference that the British Communist Party, a scrawny organization with no more than 18,000 members, played "the crucial role" in "the historic turning point in the struggle for a new type of Labor government."

The Labor Party's all-consuming internal struggle is also cause for concern to the Tories. Conservative Chairman Lord Thorneycroft told his party's conference last week: "A strong, patriotic, clear-headed opposition is an essential factor in the conduct of government." Deputy Tory Leader William Whitelaw warned: "We must be twice as vigilant in judging our own policies."

Labor's right fears that the left's extremists are endangering the very life of the party. In a letter published in the Guardian, Williams, Rodgers and former Foreign Secretary David Owen warned that factional cooperation was no longer possible: "The far left wants no compromises," wrote this "Gang of Three." "It is seeking not only to dominate the party, but to destroy representative democracy itself."

--By Bonnie Angelo/ London

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