Stephen Haseler
Founder member of the SDP who predicted a British republic in The End of the House of Windsor
STEPHEN HASELER, who has died aged 75, was a professor of government, director of the Global Policy Institute, a sometime GLC Labour councillor, a founder member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and a prolific author of books on contemporary politics and economics; he became familiar to the public, however, as Britain’s best known republican polemicist.
In the 1970s Haseler played an important role in the struggle for the soul of the Labour Party at a time when it was being infiltrated by the extreme Left. He was an admirer of the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who, as he argued in The Gaitskellites in 1969 (based on his doctoral thesis), had persuaded the British people that Labour was not really a socialist party and could be trusted to run a mixed economy.
He became increasingly concerned at how the party, under Gaitskell’s successor Harold Wilson, was being infiltrated by mostly public-schooleducated Marxists who, as he put it in a series of articles in The Daily Telegraph, were obsessed with the “new politics of participation”, as opposed to the “old politics of housing, education and income redistribution”, and were attempting “to persuade the Labour movement that ‘working men’ have no stake in the Parliamentary system”.
In 1975 he co-founded, with Douglas Eden, the Social Democratic Alliance (SDA) to fight the Left’s advance. It initially focused on links between senior party figures and the Communist Party, embarrassing Harold Wilson at the 1975 Party Conference by pointing out the Communist contacts of members of the Party’s National Executive Committee.
Before the 1979 general election, he and fellow SDA member Roger Fox wrote an open letter to the prime minister, Jim Callaghan, naming 40 Labour MPS whose Communist sympathies they saw as a threat, including Michael Foot and Tony Benn, challenging Callaghan to repudiate them. His refusal to do so helped at the general election of that year to make the public aware of where the Labour Party was going and contributed to the background noise from such former Labour government figures as Lord George-brown and Lord Chalfont, which helped ensure the victory of Margaret Thatcher.
As a consequence both Haseler and Fox were expelled from their local party, though their expulsion was later rescinded by an NEC subcommittee chaired by Eric Heffer (himself a former Communist), on the grounds that the party did not want to make martyrs of the pair.
In January 1981 the SDA jointly organised a conference to discuss founding a social democratic party, but were overtaken by events, as Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers formed the Campaign for Social Democracy, which became the SDP, of which Haseler was also a founder member. In the GLC elections of that year, Haseler stood against the Left-wing “Red” Ted Knight in Norwood, a council seat Labour was expected to win, helping to ensure the seat went to the Conservatives – and Knight suffered a heavy defeat.
But the “Gang of Four” found Haseler no easier to deal with than the Labour Party. Differences soon began to emerge, with Haseler arguing that the new party should become a populist alternative to Labour, fiercely anti-socialist, and should seek to express the unrepresented consensus of working-class opinion – in favour of collectivist redistributive measures, but conservative on social issues. The SDP’S leadership, however, forged an alliance with the Liberals, pitching the new party’s appeal at middle-class voters, including disaffected Tories.
Tensions came to a head in 1982 when Haseler stood against Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers for the presidency and issued a manifesto accusing his rivals of having “defended extremism” as members of the last Labour government. He won 4,255 votes to Shirley Williams’s 19,006 and afterwards left active politics.
Haseler would probably have had a more conventionally successful political career had he possessed a cooler temperament. One senior Labour figure described him as moderate in opinion but extreme in personality. A calmer figure, however, would have been less fertile in ideas and less of a challenge to conventional politics. Indeed it is possible that had the SDP moved in the direction he had wanted, it might have established itself as the natural home for working class voters. As it was, the party’s poor showing in the 1987 general election led to the end of its separate existence.
Haseler changed his mind on many issues, switching from opposition to the EEC to almost fanatical support for an EU federal “superstate”, but the unifying theme throughout his life was his visceral hatred of Britain’s “antiquated” class system and the institutions which, in his view, perpetuated class divisions – chief among them the monarchy.
A latter day Cromwellian who chaired the anti-monarchist group Republic, Haseler saw the evil hand of “these strange old people who prance around with orbs” behind everything from the humiliation of Suez and the tragedy of Afghanistan to the malign influence of class and the decline of British manufacturing, while acting as the cement holding in place institutions that are undemocratic, secretive and unaccountable.
In The End of the House of Windsor
(1993) he argued that a British republic was inevitable and called for immediate action to ensure a smooth transition of power, but as the monarchy itself weathered the ups and downs of recent years, his hopes that Britain was about to make the trek to the sunlit uplands of rational republicanism were continually being dashed. A Yougov poll in 2015 found 68 per cent of the British public believing the monarchy to be good for the country, with only nine per cent taking the opposite view.
Stephen Michael Alan Haseler was born in Colchester, Essex, on January 9 1942, when his father was serving as an Army officer in North Africa, and educated at Westcliff High School, Southend. After the war his father came down in the world, working as a salesman. Stephen would always treat door-to-door salesmen with great courtesy.
He went on to study at University College London, switching after a year to the London School of Economics. For recreation he chose student politics and he went on to take a PHD on revisionism in the Labour Party.
While researching his doctorate he became Labour’s youngest parliamentary candidate, going on to fight, and lose, the safe Tory seat of Saffron Walden at the 1966 general election. He stood in 1970 for the Tory marginal of Maldon, but again unsuccessfully.
The same year he took up a teaching job at the City of London Polytechnic and would stay on (from 1986 as Professor of Government) through its transition to London Guildhall University then London Metropolitan University.
He was elected to the Greater London Council for the Wood Green ward in 1973 and later served as a deputy mayor and chairman of its General Purposes committee. In 1975 he and Douglas Eden resigned their committee chairmanships, alleging that the council’s Labour leadership was caving in to the “ultra Left”. They lost the Labour Whip the following year.
During the 1970s and 1980s Haseler forged strong ties with the American Right, holding, at various times, visiting professorships at Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, George Mason University and the University of Maryland-baltimore County, and becoming a member of the American Heritage Foundation.
Increasingly impressed by the radicalism of Margaret Thatcher, in 1988 he became a co-founder and co-chairman of the Radical Society, a pro-market body embracing political figures from Norman Tebbit and Professor Norman Stone to ex-labour social democrats. The following year he published Thatcher & The New Liberals, described by one critic as a “bible” for the new movement, in which he argued that the momentous changes Thatcherism made possible, in particular the rise of a new middle class, would undermine the hold of Britain’s ancien regime – the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Established Church.
His conversion to the cause of European federalism seems to have been provoked by the growth of Euroscepticism among Britain’s traditional social elite. “What on earth is unattractive or undesirable about a superstate of which we would be a major player?” he asked in a letter to The Times in 2000. “We can also point out that the Americans have done very well out of being a superstate, and we should welcome the advantages that such political clout would bring to the peoples of these islands.” Indeed part of his case for the abolition of the monarchy was that in such a superstate, the Queen would become a citizen of Europe like any of her subjects.
In 1999 Haseler was on the list of the Pro-euro Conservative Party (formed by members of the European Parliament who had resigned from the Conservative Party in protest at its anti-euro stance) in that year’s European Parliament elections.
Following the publication of his book The Super-rich: The Unjust World of Global Capital (2001), Haseler also wrote and lectured widely on the global financial crisis and rising inequality. His other books included The Death of British Democracy (1976); Eurocommunism (1978); The Tragedy of Labour (1981); The English Tribe: Identity, Nation and the New Europe (1996); Super-state – The New Europe and the Challenge to America (2004); Sidekick: British Global Strategy from Churchill to Blair (2006); Meltdown: How the Masters of the Universe Destroyed the West’s Power and Prosperity (2008) and Meltdown UK (2010).
In 2012, to coincide with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, he published Grand Delusion, in which he argued that the class structure which the monarchy has continued to encourage has retained outdated attitudes which have negatively affected Britain’s economy, capacity to innovate and international stature.
He married, in 1967, Roberta (“Bay”) Alexander. It was an outstandingly happy marriage. Their home became a haven for friends of every political stripe and nationality who enjoyed political debate with no holds barred and no offence taken, Bay’s good humour taking any edge off Stephen’s more aggressive flights of rhetoric. She survives him.
Stephen Haseler, born January 9 1942, died July 20 2017