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The Labour Party's Changing Relationship to Europe 135
the Liberal Party. 70 The Alliance attracted membership away from the Labour Party,
and showed itself in by-elections to be capable of contesting both Conservative
and Labour 'safe seats'. 71 Ignoring the Alliance threat, and with the most articulate
pro-Europeans out of the Party, the Labour Party held fast to its strong anti-European
rhetoric for the 1983 campaign. In 1982 there was not a single discussion concerning
Europe at the Labour Annual Conference, except a casual remark by
Michael Foot reaffirming the Party's commitment to withdrawal. On election day, 9
June 1983, Labour lost further 31 seats on top of its 1979 loss, leaving the Party
with 209 seats, and the Conservatives with 397. Labour was decimated.
Confronted with such failure, and faced with a round of elections for the European
Parliament, the Labour Party decided to accept the Community and Britain’s
membership for the duration of the upcoming European Parliamentary session,
1984-1989, and retain merely the ‘option’ to withdraw. 72 However, during the 1986
and 1987 Labour Party Conferences there was no debate or even comment on the
state of European affairs. After the third straight loss to the Conservatives in 1987,
the Labour Party was officially unelectable.
The Final Transformation: Labour Reunifies as the Party for Europe – 1987-1994
Labour’s failures in the 1983 and 1987 elections demanded a radical change in
policy – and in the late 1980s the Party launched a thorough Policy Review. Not
only a result of electoral failure, the Policy Review was also designed to confront
the perceived inefficacy of traditional Labour economic policies. The President of
France, François Mitterrand had attempted to create a socialist state in France during
the years 1981-1984. His experiment failed badly and forced a reversal of policy.
“From this experience, European socialists generally drew the conclusion that a
new strategy had to be devised which would operate on a European scale.” 73 As
these events overtook them, anti-Marketeers began to re-evaluate their positions;
the Policy Review was not, however, as some claim, merely a response to Thatcherism.
It also coincided with changes on the European stage which promoted European
policies that more closely mirrored Labour’s traditional domestic aims.
70. Although the Liberal Party had been consistently pro-Europe since the 1950's, until the SDP-Liberal
Alliance, they had never provided enough of electoral threat to force the major parties to consider
seriously their impact in a campaign.
71. In November 1981, Shirley Williams won a by-election victory for the SDP in the Conservative
seat of Crosby. In February of 1983 the Liberals won the traditional Labour seat of Bermondsey.
72. In 1979 European Parliamentary elections amounted to a “deep-dilemma – how [could] a profoundly
anti-EEC party go out and ask for Votes to send its representatives to the European Parliament”?
Ph. WEBSTER, The Campaign in the UK, in: D. WOOD (ed.), The Times Guide to the
1979 European Parliament, Times Books, London, 1979, p.42.
73. S. GEORGE and B. ROSAMOND, The European Community, in: M. SMITH and J. SPEAR
(eds.), The Changing Labour Party, Routledge, London, 1992, p.178.