Straws in the Wind: The 1979 Vote of No Confidence

Abstract

Mrs Shirley Williams, in her emotional but considered letter of resignation from the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, summed up the feelings of the Labour defectors when she wrote in February 1981: ‘The party I loved and worked for over so many years, no longer exists … it is not the democratic socialist party that I joined.’¹ It was this negative feeling which best expressed the case for the creation of a new party. Moderates had become so heartily disillusioned with the Labour Party that they no longer felt they could work within it to achieve effective change — and still less win parliamentary power. Such cries of disaffection from within had, of course, been a periodic occurrence in the fractious history of the Labour Party. Since its bold inception, the party had been split, as we have noted, between its belief in socialism and belief in social democratic principles. Indeed, was it a party of trade-unionism and really little more? It was created from an improbable partnership between stolid working-class trade-unionists and idealistic middleclass intellectuals. It has never since decided ‘whether it is a party of gradual reform in the Liberal and social democratic tradition or of red-hot, full-blooded socialism’.² As David Marquand explained, the liberal element in the Labour Party had given the party a reason for its existence: