BRIAN Grogan says that the 'bosses need the policies of the SDP like a hole in the head.' But, as the old refrain goes, what about the workers?
The rise of the SDP represents the crisis of leadership of both classes in society. The Tories have liquidated a considerable part of their popular support among the working class.
Large sections of the middle class cannot stomach their war-mongering and pulverising of jobs in the public sector. Independent of ruling class support for the Tory programme (although Brian underestimates the bosses' divisions) the Tories meet widespread resistance. The heart of that resistance is the organised working class.
The question for the bosses is not that a new course represented by the policies of the SDP is opening up, but rather how they can fundamentally divide and further weaken the workers' movement.
At the same time they face the electoral annihilation of their own party at the next election.
To stop the defeat of the Tories turning into something far worse — a crisis in the way that the ruling class governs — sections of the ruling class will move behind the SDP.
There is also a real crisis of leadership in the workers' movement. At the moment the right wing leaders of the labour movement have the simple project of Labour adopting the policies of the SDP.
But the mantle of Wilson and Callaghan and the 'good old sixties' has been firmly grasped by the SDP. As a result, the right wing Labour leaders succeed only in building the SDP.
The upshot is likely to be a major division in the traditional Labour vote at the next election — and the basis therefore laid for a coalition government between the SDP and sections of the Labour right.
The current witch-hunt in the Labour Party and the unions against the Bennite base is designed to create just such freedom of manoeuvre for the right wing bureaucracy.
The consequences of such a division would tend to work their way through at every level, including in the unions.
Such a prospect is by no means certain. Every major struggle against the Tories threatens to put the whole process in reverse.
The whole emphasis of Brian's letter therefore is to underestimate the significance of the SDP from the point of view of the threat that it holds for the workers' movement.
From his point of view the SDP becomes a simple re-run of Thatcherism in sheep's clothing — while the working class progressively lines up behind Benn.
To this comforting notion, we say that the class contradictions, which run through the labour movement with its thoroughly bourgeois leadership, programme and apparatus, threatens the unity of the labour movement in the next period.
Barring unforseeable and major industrial battles over the next two years we are on the verge of a period of growing polarisation and political re-composition within the labour movement.
BRIAN HERON East London