What future for the Liberals?
Jo Grimond
I thought the Liberal Parliamentary Party would come back from the election holding ten or eleven of their seats though I did not foresee the particular casualties we have suffered. I also thought we might pick up a new seat or two. The Liberal hierarchy seem, as Often happens, to have believed their own Propaganda, sweetened by our traditional rise in the polls during the campaign. Pitching for a stalemate came off as well as could be hoped. In itself it is not an inspiring exercise. Nor did it rest on any foundation of new thought built up over the years. The official pronouncements of the party have done little to fill the gap in British politics. Much British academic political thought is Marxist. Otherwise the political schools at the universities have degenerated into the bogus science of psephology. Just as fifty or so years ago the 'realists' announced that moral philosophy did not exist — so now Many professors of politics ignore political in favour of swingometers and other IV toys. The Liberal Party is not seized of the need to revise and re-state democratic liberal political thought. It has not absorbed and promulgated the new thinking that is going on. I myself tried to cast a pebble or two into he general pool with The Common Wel fare. There are plenty of others to whose work the party should pay more attention. There is, for instance, the work of the Acton S. oeiety: there is Arthur Seldon's Charge, Indeed many of the publications of the IEA, there are Robert Oakeshott's book on c°-operatives and Norman Macrae's articles in the Economist. My personal view is that the democratic and libertarian left should build on J.S. Mill and the guild socialists. It is too late to expound political philosoP, hY once a general election has been called. Is it in any case too late? I am frightened by the decline in respect for liberal values. Up 15 or 20 years ago, though the Liberal r arty was small, liberal values were widely accepted. Two of the most influential political writers, Keynes and Beveridge, were Liberals. Now the country seems to be sliPping into a semi-authoritarian sloth, rather like Spain in the last century. Children are not taught the pre-suppositions of a free society. At one of my meetings during tile election a teacher in the guise of asking a question embarked on a narking harangue, accusing me of being a 'nice man' as though being nasty like the IRA or the Red brigades was a virtue, suggesting I had never stood in a picket line, which in his cYes apparently was a symbol of virility. when some teachers set the example they '10, no wonder many children grow up with no respect for a democratic country — nor indeed for education.
To those such as myself who saw little television, being too busy gassing away to empty halls, the smugness and hypocrisy of what we did see from the Labour Party came as a shock. During a radio programme in which I took part, William Rees-Mogg put with clarity the extraordinary complacency of Jim Callaghan as he presided over the decline of Britain. As for hypocrisy: 'compassion' a word so often on the lips of Labour ministers, is hardly a convincing cry from the party of NUPE and the NUJ.
How far we have gone down the road to fascism — and a snarling and selfish fascism at that. I find it strange to listen to eulogies from liberals not only of Mrs Shirley Williams's personal virtues but of her political activities. For a Minister of the Crown to join a picket line to press workers to do what they don't want to do in an industrial dispute violently pursued by a trade union minority seemed to me highly illiberal.
If the Liberal Party does not move with more decision into the void in our politics it may be too late.
More immediately it should press the new Government to tackle the reform of our electoral and political system. Without electoral reform, we are wide open to a Labour government, elected by a minority, doing irreparable damage. Even if the Liberal Party disappeared, which it won't, this would still happen. In many constituencies, e.g. Caithness and Sutherland, the eclipse of Liberalism does not mean a Tory victory. And we should remember that every Labour MP subscribes to a party intent on nationalising not some, but all, aspects of the economy.
But with electoral reform must go wider reform of government (incidentally, to mention a rather simple matter, how have those tiny inner city constituencies survived?), I regret the translation of Francis Pym to Defence as he might have tackled this. Who else would do it — George Younger? I hope so, but the Scottish Office is an appallingly demanding Ministry.
Apart from a curious blindness to the dangers which face them and their supporters — a legacy perhaps from the arrogance generated when they were the Establishment—the Tories, like all non-Socialists, are faced with the question of what they should do with the huge nationalised dinosaurs. It is obvious that small and enterprising businesses should be backed. But what is to be done with British Leyland or British Steel or British Shipbuilding? The question is complicated for Conservatives by the possibility that many of the taxpayersupported workers in some of these industries now vote Conservative. Have workers' co-operatives a place in such industries? Should they be allowed gradually to wither away? Should they be divided into smaller units? Do we abandon motor manufacture — a soul-destroying process? Can new technology enable smaller units to take over from the ageing mammoths of thirty years ago? Then there is the question of planning. We must also not only reduce the size of government but reform its whole scope and method. Since the war planning has on balance been a disaster. The market could achieve better and much cheaper results. But this does not mean that districts, neighbourhoods, communities have not a very big part to play in making the best of themselves.
These are not matters which a Tory government can resolve in four or five years.
Here is a field for the Liberal Party. It has now to win over younger votes by showing that not only has it a valuable tactical role to play by promoting the merits of coalitions as a form of government but a strategic func tion in pushing ahead to examine how government should tackle these opportunities. How, if we can agree on the sort of society we want, we should exploit the tools which science offers us.
A side effect of the political gap is the growth of well-intentioned but fumbling movements such as the Ecology Party. Lib erals should side-step any attempt to make their party a rag-bag for fashionable eccen tiiCS but there is a need to make sense of some of the new departures in politics which spring from a thoroughly liberal fear that we are in danger of committing suicide by our surrender to scientific or economic determinism. In fact there is plenty for a Liberal Party to do. But if their efforts are to bear any fruit in five years, it must start now.
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