Catholic Church, in its 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno - taken up by Adenauer in Germany in 1945 (see Chapter 2) - for industrial democracy.
The Argument Lost
But Cole, Tawney and the social democrats had lost the arguments. The British Labour Party, unlike many of the other Western European socialist parties, now became increasingly corporatist and centralist and committed to material prosperity, efficiency and technology - all personified in 1960s Wilsonism and now inherited by Neil Kinnock. Only the British Labour Party retained direct trades union affiliation and organic links with trades unions, leading to a sectional domination and class orientation which is still not resolved. While the Western European socialist movement went largely Social Democratic, and the East went Marxist, Britain's Labour Party produced its own model - like the rest of our parties and British institutions generally. Unlike countries such as Sweden, Austria, Germany, Holland and Denmark, where there is little perception of social democratic parties being an appendage of the trade union movement, the Labour Party model has still not entirely accepted that the trades unions and Labour Party have different (and sometimes conflicting) jobs to do. In 1979, Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism in Britain collided in headon confrontation. It would take another ten years of internal battles before Labour donned the clothes of the SDP. The continuing civil war between the two factions in cities such as Liverpool demonstrates that it will be a long time yet before the basic problem of two unreconcilable forces living inside one party is resolved. Elsewhere in Europe, in the Federal Republic of Germany, for instance, the conflicting visions of socialist and social democrat came to a head thirty years before. At the Bad Godesberg special conference in 1959, a new 'Basic Programme' had been hammered out and the old socialist objective of nationalisation of industry abandoned.
Shirley Williams
Of the 'Gang of Four' social democrats who left Labour in 1981 to form their separate party, the SDP, David Owen and Shirley Williams both admitted to Christian convictions. David Owen always regarded this as essentially a private matter however and, perhaps surprisingly, says nothing about the connections