What would Conservatives conserve?

Patrick Cosgrave

Though I still have a strong hunch that there will be no general election this year, all the evidence is that politicians of all parties will be jousting against one another for the favour of the electorate early next month. In public and private alike the Prime Minister has been gmbiguous on the subject; but his attendant ministers, almost to a man, have insisted that an early appeal to the people is unavoidable, either because they cannot proceed with policies to which they are committed without the kind of mandate that gives them a certain majority in crucial parliamentary divisions, or because of a more cynical conviction that the winter will bring with it an economic situation so near to the catastrophic that one needs to be beyond the power of the other chaps to unseat one, lest one goes down in the maelstrom. This being the case it is lamentable to report that the Conservative Party is in no better a position, moral, political or philosophical to fight Mr Wilson and his colleagues than it was in the immediate aftermath of its defeat or in the horrendous dog days of May, when every opportunity was taken to scamper away from the prospect of a June election.

There is a general as well as several very particular reasons for this situation, and it would be as well to come to the general first. The truth is that there is little about the modern Conservative Party that can be identified by the thinking voter as Conservative. Of course it is true that any party so recently deeply disappointed in expectations of a renewed term of office which seemed unusually well-founded would, even after several months, find it difficult to adjust. And it is true, also that the electorate are inclined very often to prefer government by a party that can get things done, and can provide some stability of expectation, to any particular affiliation. But a party is built in the first instance on the positive allegiance of those who identify with it; and few Conservatives can whole-heartedly identify with the party as it is now.

Lord Stansgate, his works and pomps, manages to give some Tories such a thrill of fear that they can be persuaded to get out and work against him; but Lord Stansgate will be well curbed before Mr Wilson addresses the country again, and very likely confined to his usual round of his Bristol constituency and various polytechnics for the duration of the campaign as well. The detailed and organised campaign against this dissatisfied peer which has come from the Tory Party in recent weeks, however, was crude in the extreme, and betrayed a lack of certainty in understanding of the nature of policies being attacked and defended which might yet be fatal. Lord Stans gate himself had no difficulty — he is a skilled debater — in showing in a recent House of Commons debate that Mr Heath and his col leagues were far more of a mind to organise state intervention in and state subvention of industry, than himself to date; and that his nationalisation proposals could be argued to be merely an extension of what was done between 1970 and 1974. The present Tory leadership looks ludicrous as a gallant band defending the rewards and rigours of free enterprise, and that's an end oret.

None of the appellations, sentimental or realistic, which have been attached to Conser vatives through the ages can confidently be called in aid now. A European party cannot, with conviction, be a patriotic party. A party that extols thrift cannot preside over an infla tion that wipes out savings and dub the process a problem of success. A party of freedom cannot introduce state controls of prices and wages unknown before in the history of the country and continue to enjoy its reputation: even if it purports to be pragmatic in that process, pragmatism at least demands efficiency, and the adjective must be denied the party when the controls fail to achieve their purpose. And a party of parliament and democracy should not allow its leader to announce controls against which he had earlier pledged his honour, not in the hurly-burly of the House of Commons where — and this is the glory of our parliamentary democracy, such as would long ago have destroyed a President Nixon forced to face opponents twice a week over the dispatch box — he might have been challenged and made fun of, but in the opulent if faded splendour of Lancaster House.

The lack of a Conservative identity is a very serious matter, particularly to those Conservative members who face a strong Liberal challenge in their constituencies. There are a largish number of such men, and they are finding it increasingly difficult to persuade constituency workers, who have little affection for Mr Heath anyway, to put their backs into hard work against the Liberal threat, or even take it seriously as something that might be worth fighting against, when their own chiefs are, it seems, willing — nay, anxious — to have Liberal colleagues with them around the Cabinet table, and to adopt Liberal policies (if such they may be called) as the price of such comradeship. Mr Heath has recently spent a great deal of time campaigning on the Isle of Wight — because, it seems, of Cowes, he takes its loss to the Liberals last time especially hard: but he would be better advised to ignore a constituency which had a number of unusual local factors operating last time, and visit and listen to his own men in constituencies more losable than the Isle is winnable.

I should repeat my conviction that fortune has been hard on the Conservative Party, and that any political organisation defeated so unexpectedly last time would be in severe difficulties facing another contest so soon: nobody ought to be blamed too severely for the situation as it is now. That situation explains in large part the defeatism and worry that afflicts so many Tories at Westminster. A truly dread ful thing, however, is that, like Hitler and his generals in their bunker, many close to the Conservative leadership are making calcula tions about victory in an atmosphere redolent of defeat. No less than three such people have offered such calculations to me recently. The calculations assume, indeed welcome, a substantial advance of the Nationalist forces in Wales and Scotland. This, it is argued, will eat into the Labour numbers, and thus assure the Conservatives, always the majority party in England, of the dubious distinction of being the

largest, if not the majority, party in the House of Commons. In other words what I and others

like me have often, in moods of jocose despair, accused Mr Heath of favouring — the break-up of the United Kingdom — is actually becoming a part, or a covert part, of Conservative policy. What, then, is to be conserved? There was, it is true, a period of recent British political history — admirably delineated in Mr Maurice Cowling's book The Impact of Labour — in which the principal purpose of Tory and Liberal and other political forces — the principal cons cious purpose, that is — was to keep Labour out. But the Labour Party was then an unknown quantity: it seemed a body' of men wild of eye, ferocious of aspect, who wanted to be friends with Russia and would not wear morning clothes at Buckingham Palace. There is a certain amount that is ferocious of aspect in the Labour movement today, and most notably sections of the trade union movement. (Not all sections: Mr Jones, especially in the matter of dockland, has been a model of propriety with out giving an inch on the interests he repre sents; and Mr Jenkins has unionised not workers, but many traditional Tory voters.) But since Mr Cbwling's period (1920-24) we have had Labour in a peacetime coalition with the Tories, Labour producing ministers of sterling worth in war, Labour producing one of the most effective governments this century, and Labour just being around, ordinary and rea

sonably acceptable. All that time, and especial

ly in recent years, Conservatives have been claiming to be more innovative than Labour, especially in areas of state control and super vision, which they once detested: Lord Carrington., after all, was the first minister of population control. So: what is to be conserved?

In the closing broadcast of his 1966 campaign Mr Heath endeavoured to postulate a Conser

vative party at once conserving and radical. He did not possess, perhaps, the art to make his vision complete and communicable, but his essential argument was a sensible one, Many of

the new right in Parliament — those who advocate the most radical of economic mea sures — are of undeniably Conservative hue. The mission of preservation or conservation makes radicals of many men. To take an example that may seem trivial but is essential,

inflation destroys savings. The most radical economic measures are needed to protect the value of savings, especially small savings. Yet the preservation of the saver and his savings is essential if any kind of conservative society is to be .maintained, even if the last so-called

Conservative government presided over not only the most massive inflation in our history

to that date, but also the instruments of government spending which exacerbated that inflation. What is the worried voter to make of that?

Just keeping Labour out is no longer a possible, let alone an honourable policy. Once Mr

Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times den

ounced the last conservative manifesto as more socialist than its Labour equivalent that game

began to smack too much of the ins and outs of Whig politics. The Conservative Party is in travail, because it does not know what it is there to conserve. And if this state of affairs goes on for much longer there will be nothing.