Gautam said: > It would not surprise me in the least if (as you say) a lot of town > and county councils had members of Old Labour running them - but it > would surprise me a great deal if the _rank and file_ of Old Labour > was more extreme than the Parliamentary representatives. Is that > correct?
With the disclaimer that I have no hard evidence supporting anything I'm about to say and I'm certainly not an expert on the Labour Party, I think that the rank and file of the Labour Party is indeed more extreme than the leadership. Here's how I see that working. The Labour Party has about 400,000 members (compared with about 325,000 Conservative members; I couldn't find statistics for the Liberal Democrats but I suspect they're a similar size), and these people are, by self-selection, among the most socialist people in the country. The electorate in Britain, however, is significantly less socialist than the party membership, so to be elected the Labour Party needs to put up candidates who are less extreme than the average party member (often by quite a large margin). Furthermore, I think that quite a lot of long-term Labour members are moderately unhappy that they have to support people like Blair, but they know from long experience during the 1980s and 1990s that the only way to win national elections is to have such leaders - and that's much better than losing elections. (I also think that the electorate in the UK has become much less socialist quite rapidly in the last twenty years but the party membership changes more slowly and so isn't keeping up.) Rich, who knows Labour supporters who say things along these lines quite frequently. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
