Political commentary

Dr Owen's dilemma

Colin Welch

No sooner had I despatched my last (or first) piece to the printer than 1 realis- ed that the balance was wrong. Support them or no, most of us do think the Social Democrats a good thing or better than what most of them left. We value the fundamen- tal decency of what they stand for. We may even envy them bits of their platform — on the unions, for instance. We wish them well, sincerely if perhaps with reservations.

Of all this to my regret I wrote nothing. Why? Well, I took much of it for granted. Nor can anyone claim that the beauties of the Social Democrats have gone unserenad- ed. Furthermore, a party which calls repeatedly for the rigorous examination of every problem, a party which indeed often seems to regard such examinations as a substitute for a clear guiding philosophy, can hardly object to being rigorously ex- amined itself. So much has been written about its prospects, its ups and recently downs, its effect on the political scene, its personalities, so little about what it actually says. Not that Mr Rodgers actually said to our senior citizens 'drop dead' or 'fly for your lives'. I just interpreted him freely so.

Doubtless I was unjust to his benevolent intentions. But his benevolence does ex- press itself in a chillingly patronising way. Diffidently he offers a Minister for the Elderly — not a reassuring start. Less dif- fidently he asserts that the elderly may no longer need bigger pensions in cash but rather 'cheaper and convenient public transport to improve access to family and friends', as also better housing, heating, `leisure' and health. He further proposes `positive discrimination' for the elderly as also for blacks, the disabled, large poor families and 'the very frail'.

Some of the elderly might be passively grateful for all these boons. Others might think it grossly illiberal in Mr Rodgers to offer them what he thinks they ought to have rather than the means of buying what they actually want, thereby denying them the dignity of choice. Convenient transport, for instance, is not much use to 'the very frail', frightened or bedridden. It may only bear the mugger more swiftly to and from his prey, the hooligan's brick to the win- dow. Nor does 'positive discrimination' always make its beneficiaries respected and loved. Dare I say that many elderly people, lonely, unhappy and unattractive as they feel themselves to be, might like above all, say, an occasional drink or smoke, even to be able to offer some such cheer `to family and friends'? I do not see Mr Rodgers bringing any such comforts (of which, with Dr Owen, he vehemently disapproves), nor yet the cash to buy them. If they are unat- tainable now, they will be more so when he has doubled the price of tobacco and li- quor, as he clearly desires to do, if too shy precisely to say so. `No to smoking. No to alcohol. Yes to seat belts' is a favourite slogan of his. Should we add `No to freedom'?

Mr Rodgers and his friends would angril- ly object. What they call freedom they value highly. Dr Owen quotes Mill twice, once to the effect that 'men would learn by being free', that freedom produces morally better people because it forces them to develop 'their potentialities'. He even speaks highly of 'the individual's right to self-direction'. Fine: but what does he mean by freedom? Two things, it seems, combin- ed to form a panacea for all ills: de- centralisation and democratic participation. In the army we were taught, 'If it moves, salute it. If doesn't move, polish it'. From Dr Owen we learn, `If it exists, decentralise it. If it is decentralised, participate in it'.

Nowhere does he recognise that the in- dividual's right to self-direction may be far less restricted by a central authority which governs loosely than by a host of regional, local and functional authorities which direct and interfere as much as he would wish.

Only very intermittently seems he aware of the fact that many people find participa- tion a frightful bore and would rather cultivate their own gardens than argue ceaselessly with hordes of busybodies. He favours participation partly for our own good. He slily quotes Mill again on our duty to free even slaves who like being slaves, `because only free men are wholly human'. But democratic participation is not freedom; nor can eager participators alone be regarded as 'wholly human'. Gardeners are human too.

Other boons to be expected from par- ticipation are various and bizarre.

Most improbably Dr Owen hopes that an industrial system mastered and controlled by 'individuals coming together freely' will be more rather than less friendly to 'the new technology' and its attendant disturbances, less keen to sustain old industries, to 'refuse robots', to preserve 'the traditional office' and so on. Has Dr Owen not read Sir Henry Maine who, unless memory errs, doubted whether universal suffrage would have per- mitted the supersession of the stage coach and the handloom?

Mrs Williams's own notion of participa- tion is odd in a revealing way. As an exam- ple of it, she cites the regional conferences she held as Education Minister. To these 'a wide range of people was invited' (my italics), including 'representatives' of teachers, parents, trade unions, local education authorities and pupils. Before these carefully selected studio audiences, the Minister explained her 'problems and priorities', and created 'a more balanced and friendly atmosphere', favourable to `reform'. In other words, she participated like billy-o and the stooges meekly approved. Nowhere does Dr Owen let the cat so naively out of the bag. But he does waffle opaquely on about the need for a decen- tralised society `to develop a counterbalanc- ing sense of interdependence', about identi- fying first 'with' the 'community' and then `to' the nation, and about 'building uP through democratic involvement a sense of community in order to rediscover a respon- sibility from the individual to the state' — phew! So far as I understand this stuff at all, I discern a misty vision of the dethroned state reappearing like a ghost and reassert- ing itself by supernatural means.

Now some of the defects of decentralisa- tion will strike whoever watches regional TV. In Wiltshire we are Southern. We are thus assumed, quite wrongly, to be more in- terested in what goes on in distant Brighton and Southampton than in what goes on in London or elsewhere, and to prefer dull regional programmes to good London ones. Regions, in other words, are mostly bogus, marrying like to unlike, subjecting minorities to bigger minorities, assuming a regional homogeneity and separateness which hardly anywhere exists. Why then should regional or local tyrannies be more tolerable and efficient than a national one?

Perhaps for one reason, some might say: that decentralisation could, for good or ill, permit local innovation and experiment. But how will such initiatives fit in with Dr Owen's national planning, which will ap- parently burgeon and preponderate, decen- tralisation or no? Are we not here again at the very heart of Dr Owen's dilemma, of that strange sentimentality to which I refer- red last week? How on earth can decen- tralisation and participation be combined with all the other things he and his friends want?

With a statutory incomes policy, for in- stance, actually reducing some incomes? With national jehads against tobacco and alcohol, against private health and educa- tion? With a switch of national resources to `preventive medicine'? With 'an integrated transport policy,' an overall energy policy', 'a coherent industrial strategy'? With a massive redistribution of wealth and incomes (a process which Dr Owen most misleadingly regards as making no 'claim on the nation's real resources'. If it transfers funds from the more productive to the less so, from the investor to the con- sumer, it thereby reduces our resources; so do whatever vast sums are spent or wasted in the bureaucratic process of redistribu- tion)?

If not all, most of these desiderata de- mand increased coercive powers for the central state. What will our decentralisers do about that? How will they square this circle? Or will they alternately centralise, decentralise and recentralise, like a man playing an accordion? Watch this space.