Roy "The Renegade"

Although he ended up as a Liberal Democrat Lord, Roy Jenkins was for a time at the heart of the leadership of the Labour Party during the Sixties and Seventies alongside Wilson and co., serving as Aviation minister, Home Secretary and then Chancellor of the Exchequer during the 1964-70 Labour government and again as Home Secretary from 1974 -6. He was also deputy leader of the party during the Heath government.

Elected as a Labour MP in 1948 - but already known to the political establishment from his Oxford days - he quickly worked himself in with the rightwing clique which dominated the then leadership of the party. These people saw it as their sworn duty to keep the Labour Party safe as a sort of Second-Eleven for capitalism. But to achieve this they had to fight and manoeuvre against the movement from below, the party rank and file and the affiliated unions especially, who in turn reflected the pressure from the working class itself. Even during the boom years of the1950s the ruling class understood that these two sides reflected mutually opposed and irreconcilable interests who would clash in the future and according financed the right wing to a considerable degree.

A regular contributor to the Labour right-wing mouthpiece Encounter he was, according to his autobiography '… not particularly shocked when it… emerged that the magazine was partly CIA-financed.' In fact CIA involvement went far beyond this with various right wing setups in the movement being covertly funded for decades.

Increasingly isolated in the party during the Seventies, especially over Europe but also in hostility to the unions, he quit as an MP in 1976 to become president of the European Commission. After this (well paid) period in Europe he grandly decided that the time had come to re-enter the fray of British politics. With the defeat of the Labour government in 1979 and a growth in militancy both on the industrial front and inside the party, he felt that the time was ripe to launch a new party aimed at replacing a Labour Party he now deemed unsuitable for service to capital. Like many before and after, he would be proved very wrong.

'I had long been well disposed towards most Liberals.' he later wrote, however he saw a direct move into the Liberal party as not 'a satisfactory strategy for changing the pattern of British politics… a substantial social democratic breakaway from the Labour Party, on the other hand, might be a much more repercussive matter.' In other words split the party from within.

The new party was first 'floated' on the occasion of a BBC lecture in November 1979. The original draft of his speech was deemed "too right wing" by the Tory Ian Gilmour but remained largely unchanged even in its final televised version. Not unsurprisingly much of it sounds like an anticipation of the sort of stuff which would later be spewed out by theoreticians of Blairism and the so-called 'third way'.

Initially, Jenkins and his co-conspirators continued openly as if nothing was afoot whilst plotting to form a new party from behind the scenes, but they could not hold back forever.

With much publicity the new party - called the SDP - was launched in January 1981 (following a special Labour Party conference which had voted in new democratic reforms much to the distaste of the right wing) at David Owen's posh Limehouse residence by Jenkins, Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers.

The SDP were initially touted by the media as being dead certs to replace Labour in the polls and bi-election successes such as Crosby and Hillhead (where Jenkins was returned to parliament) seemed to support that theory, so they thought. But the general election of 1983 was not to provide that breakthrough - in league with the Liberals they got just 25.5% of the vote, two points behind Labour. Their vote was not enough to pick up large numbers of seats but was enough to cost Labour seats through vote splitting. Although Thatcher would probably have still won the election without the aid of the SDP traitors, many would come to blame the Gang of Four for giving the Tories such a strong hand with their massive parliamentary majority.

From then on it was clear that the ruling class no longer had any faith in the SDP/Liberal Alliance ever crossing the proverbial Rubicon and that their sole remaining purpose would be a temporary one of holding back Labour's vote. In the1987 election, the SDP decline was more pronounced: half a million votes and 5 seats lost including that of Hillhead. There only remained the task of administering the last rights to the SDP through a formal merger with the Liberals to form the Lib-Dems. Unfortunately for Jenkins, fate was to play a cruel joke. David Owen who replaced Jenkins as leader after 1983 had not only moved much to the right but had also developed even more allusions of grandeur than was normally the case for these people. He launched a campaign against merger which resulted in a long and bitter conflict involving the sort of splits, plots and defeats which they had so despised in the Labour Party.

With the SDP now a distance memory all that remained was for Jenkins to depart from politics, taking up a nice retirement 'job' as Chancellor of Oxford and writing books. In his final years he became an icon to the Blairite clique (who include many former SDPers), giving out advice to them from behind the scenes in the hope that they might succeed where he failed. Jenkins' treacherous role in the Labour movement serves as a warning to the whole movement of the double agenda being carried out by the right wing, effectively seeking to serve two masters but in the final analysis serving only one, that of capital. The struggle for a working class leadership, armed with a socialist programme, remains an ongoing one even though Jenkins has finally departed the fray.