POLITICS
Fighting phoney wars in the dark, and how not to do it
NOEL MALCOLM
Immediately after the initial campaign launches, I wrote in this column that the Conservatives would suffer from a cam- paign with which the Prime Minister was identified whole-heartedly by her oppo- nents and half-heartedly by herself. This prediction turns out to have been only partly correct. Mrs Thatcher has indeed been identified as the key issue of the campaign by her chief opponents — Messrs Heath and Kinnock. But her own efforts to lend her personal authority to the Con- servative Euro-campaign have fallen far short of the half-hearted. It is as if she regarded the whole election as some sort of unmentionable scandal, where the only thing to do is to try your hardest to ensure that they keep your name out of it. This is unfortunate for those Conserva- tive Euro-candidates in marginal and not- so-marginal seats, who know that the secret of success for them lies in drumming enough of the Tory faithful out of their electoral apathy. They know that a Euro- pean election is not like a general election, where you have to court the floating voter. Even in a marginal Euro-constituency, the turn-out is so low that it is quite sufficient to float a few more of your own supporters out of their living rooms and into the polling booths. Mrs Thatcher understands that a Euro- pean election is not like a general election; that is one of her strengths, but during the Euro-campaign itself it also becomes one of her problems. She cannot think of Conservative MEPs in anything like the same terms, the same mental categories, as she thinks of Tory MPs at Westminster. These Euro-chappies may wear her uni- form when they are on parade, but they are not part of her regular army. Her refusal to think of them as real politicians was made symbolically plain at her first campaign press conference, when she studiously ignored the presence of Mr Christopher Prout (leader of the Tory MEPs) on the same platform. As each question was either answered by the Prime Minister or passed by her to the Foreign Secretary, Mr Prout's face gradually tautened into a mask of concealed pain, like someone at a dinner table who has chewed something indescrib- ably bitter but cannot spit it out for fear of offending his hostess.
Deep down, one feels, Mrs Thatcher regards the Euro-electoral apathy of the British people as a tacit vote of support for her own attitude to Europe. In general terms there is probably much truth in this; but on 15 June her support will be mea- sured in specific terms by the number of votes cast for her candidates. Having taken such a high profile on Europe during the last nine months, it ill behoves her to preside over such a low-profile campaign.
British apathy towards European elec- tions is in any case, like all negative phenomena, peculiarly difficult to inter- pret. For apathy to express an attitude, people have to possess some basic know- ledge of what it is that they are being apathetic towards. Anecdotal evidence from canvassers suggests that roughly a third of the voters are unaware of the existence of a European election next week. Many of these people, when told about the European election, assume that is must be something for Europeans, i.e. foreigners, and therefore nothing to do with them.
Even people who do not understand what a European election is may still have real opinions about British participation in the EEC. The difficulty lies in finding out what those opinions are. The organisers of opinion polls seem to be engaged in a conspiracy of confusion, determined never to ask any unambiguous questions on this issue. Last year, for example, the Mail on Sunday gave the results of an NOP survey under the headline, 'Euro-poll Shock for Maggie'. The question was, 'Do you think Mrs Thatcher's attitude will leave Britain isolated in the EEC, or do you think she is acting in Britain's best interests?' The result (Isolated': 31 per cent 'best in- terests': 52 per cent) was virtually meaningless, since it was perfectly possible to agree with both alternatives. In January of this year, this absurdity was capped by the Mintel 'Lifestyle' poll, which revealed that 67 per cent of those questioned agreed with the proposition, 'We should move towards a United States of Europe, pro- vided Britain retains the ability to make all her own decisions.' But at least this find- ing, unlike the earlier one, does yield one solid piece of information: it confirms that large numbers of people are just as con- fused as the pollsters who question them.
When such ignorance and confusion on important points are so rampant, it may seem an unfair or unnecessary piece of fine tuning to ask the average voter what he thinks the European Parliament actually does. But this is the true nub of the issue. Mrs Thatcher's refusal to think of MEPs as comparable to MPs is justified: the Euro- pean Parliament is not a real parliament in our sense, because it does not exercise real legislative power. And unless and until Europe becomes a real unitary state, there is no reason why it should do — indeed, there are twelve reasons why it should not. But in order to get even a small proportion of the electorate into the polling booths, the major parties have to go round pre- tending that they are doing something closely similar to what they do when they put up candidates for Westminster.
Sometimes this pretence leads them to bluster: the Labour European manifesto announces that these elections 'will influ- ence very deeply the way Britain responds to the challenge of 1992 and beyond', and argues that 'we need more Labour MEPs to fight the Conservatives' — two resound- ingly empty assertions. Sometimes it leads to mendacity: a Tory booklet, 50 Questions and Answers on the European Community, claims that the European Parliament 'has powers which enable it to exercise demo- cratic control over all forms of Community decision-making'. Both party leaderships, in reality, are glad that the powers of the European Parliament are as limited as they are.
Both the main parties know, in other words, that the European election is by its very nature a bit of a non-event. The whole campaign is a phoney war; but even phoney wars have their rules, and Mrs Thatcher does not quite understand them if she thinks that the way to win is to retire to your bunker and shut the door.
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