A scary thought... It's 25 years since the Gang of Four tried to re-invent British politics with the Limehouse Declaration. Can you remember what it actually said? No, I can't either. (I was an Old Labour loyalist back then, so I wrote the whole thing off as a deviationist sideshow. Nowadays, of course, I'd be wearing an "Owen for PM" badge.)
The words were hardly memorable, despite the 18 drafts it had taken to produce the final speech. But their ambition was huge and the consequences remain controversial today.
A thoughtful article in the Guardian looks back at the high hopes and the what-might-have-beens:
A quarter of a century ago, they gathered on a Sunday morning with a draft of a statement but no firm plans. Even the choice of Limehouse was an accident. [William] Rodgers' wife Silvia had refused to let them meet in her house in north London: "Otherwise they might have issued the Kentish Town Communique - which I shall always regret," she says...
In a joint statement in the Guardian, what was then the gang of three called for "an acceptable socialist alternative". The word socialist mattered: the party, at its birth at least, aimed to be a socialist one. It was only later, after 1983, as Owen led it towards what he calls the "tough centre", that it emerged as something recognisably close to New Labour (ironically, one of the names, along with Radical, that the founders had considered calling the new party before settling on Social Democratic Party)
All a long time ago. (No wonder the article makes the mistake of marrying off Michael Foot to Jill Tweedie rather than Jill Craigie.) Plus some intriguing asides on the in-fighting that the SDP's emergence provoked in the Grauniad's own offices. As sketch-writer and Gang fan, Michael White, recalls:
We dismissed our left critics as unworldly "public school Trots" - since their numbers included graduates of Eton, Winchester and Roedean - while warning the SDP defectors that they would not be able to replace Labour in its heartlands.
There it is again: the old class divide....
"graduates of Eton, Winchester and Roedean": GRADUATES? Have those schools crossed the pond, then?
Posted by: dearieme | Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 03:05 AM