What Future for the Labour Party?

Rose, Paul B., Contemporary Review

MY new satellite television brought me instant live access to a huge jamboree that was both spontaneous and carefully stage-managed at one and the same time. It could have been a pop concert or the celebration at the |World Series' in baseball (which involves solely the USA). One sees an apparently wide spectrum of American society all holding placards, while waving, jumping, shouting or shimmying in support of the new Democratic Party's nominee for the Presidential candidacy. For those who have attended endless boring sequences of speeches at Labour Party Conferences it is hard to recognise this as a political event. It is also difficult to believe that this is the convention of a party that has lost five out of six of the last Presidential Elections.

There is however one significant difference from the Labour Party in Britain. This broad coalition can still dominate Congress. It still holds numerous levers of real power. Above all, even if it is not, it appears to be credible and electable. It unites a remarkably wide variety of interest groups and makes its appeal to curiously different geographical and sociological targets. The main appeal is to the middle class but the |minorities' and the poor are not forgotten. Its main target is middle America but it points strikingly -- particularly in the choice of Al Gore -- to the South, as well as to the cities that traditionally house the Democratic faithful.

If it seems infantile, one must remember that America is still a young country. It arouses at one and the same time a European contempt and a sort of envy. While one delegate pledges his support on the basis of the ability to spell potato -- lacking in the current Vice President of the greatest power on earth -- a more sophisticated and serious note is conjured by the spellbinding oratory of Mario Cuomo. This very odd mixture of sophistication and total lack of inhibition is peculiarly American. It is a mystery until one begins to understand that Democracy itself is being celebrated. There is still an almost disarmingly naive patriotism and belief in a unique way of life. One may sneer but it proved to be the main bulwark in the war against European fascism two generations ago. Nor should it be forgotten that both before, during and after that war the Democrats were the natural party of government.

The following day, or was it two days later, since it is difficult to synchronise hours across the Atlantic, the news of John Smith's and Margaret Becket's election as leader and deputy leader of the British Labour Party was wedged somewhere between the news of Nick Faldo on the golf course and the horrors suffered by Bosnian refugees. This must have been the most boring, pre-determined and uninspiring leadership contest ever held by a political party in the …

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Publication information: Article title: What Future for the Labour Party?. Contributors: Rose, Paul B. - Author. Magazine title: Contemporary Review. Volume: 261. Issue: 1521 Publication date: October 1992. Page number: 179+. © 1999 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. COPYRIGHT 1992 Gale Group.

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