Winter of Tory Discontent

By ANGUS MAUDE, MP

IT is obvious that the Conservative party has completely lost effective political initiative. Its ia%‘n supporters in the country are divided and deeply worried by this failure, while to the elec- torate at large the Opposition has become a meaningless irrelevance.

However temporary this situation may be, it is sufficiently alarming, bad for the country as well as for the party. How far the decline is due to misfortune and how far to ineptitude is debat- able. Certainly the Rhodesia crisis has been an important immediate cause, diverting attention from domestic affairs and Government policies on which the Opposition might have spoken v,ith authority. The Rhodesia crisis was itself inflated by the Conservative split; and this, to- gether with the Prime Minister's light-minded opportunism, has captured attention to the ex- clusion of more important matters.

Meanwhile, Labour's government by gimmick and promise continues virtually unopposed. Scarcely a minister ever actually does anything; but each week the political correspondents faith- fully retail the privately communicated outlines of a new and grandiose ministerial plan. Integra- tion, co-ordination, rationalisation, reorganisa- tion, modernisation—most ministers can do it in their sleep, although some wait until they are temporarily woken up by being shifted to a different department.

With an Opposition. however, it is different. An Opposition is expected to oppose, and to do it with a certain amount of clatter and panache. Of late the difficulty has been not so much the lack of positive proposals to oppose—although these have not been plentiful—but the inflation of the Rhodesian affair into a full-time international crisis. In helping this inflation along, the Con- servative right wing has played straight into the hands of the Prime Minister, who knows very IA di that in times of international crisis the great majority of the public dislikes an Opposition that rocks the boat. Hence the care taken to make it appear that something is always happening—or about to happen—in connection with Rhodesia. It keeps the crisis in the news, and the Opposition on the wrong foot.

To those Conservative supporters who sincerely believe that the Government's whole Rhodesia policy is wrong and ought to be opposed, the present situation is doubly mortifying. Their party appears not only to be living in sin with the Government, but to have been demoralised by the experience to the point of catalepsy. It is little wonder that some of them see Mr. Wilson as a kind of Dracula.

Of course, it is in the nature of the right ing to be suspicious of party leaders. Advocacy of, or acquiescence in, any state of affairs markedly different from that of the 1930s will always be branded by someone as 'pink social- ism.' (Even the abolition of RPM was dragged into this Category.) This would seriously limit the leaders' freedom of manoeuvre if they took any notice of it, which for the most part they don't. Rut now the radical wing of the party (which, being largely Powellite in its economic credo, is Paradoxically much more anti-socialist—.-and therefore much farther to what is popularly Angus Maude is the Conservatives' front bench spokesman on the colonies. thought of as the 'right'—than are the restric- tionist hangovers from the 1930s) is becoming uneasy, and the centre is frankly restive.

This is a desperately dangerous situation. The Conservative party used to have an infallible instinct for survival. It is probable that it still has it, and it has seldom needed it more. When I first entered the House of Commons my seniors used to tell me that the Tory survival mechanism consisted of a tendency to 'rally to the Leader in times of crisis.' In fact, the Tory instinct for survival depends on something entirely different. It has shown itself in the past in an ability to discern in doubtful situations what the people of this country really want.

For the most part the leaders have been chosen for their ability to project this instinct into action. Hence Baldwin, Churchill and Macmillan, each triumphantly successful in the initial task of imparting a needed change of direction. That each of the three patently lost interest and impetus when the initial task was accomplished may be coincidence; but in any case the leadership (wartime Churchill ob- viously excepted) has never been the essential element of success. It was the instinctive identifi- cation with the national ethos that counted, and the ability to discern in which direction its stirrings and questings were aimed.

The stern political moralist may regard this as no more than political pimping, but he is wrong. It is easy P.-- deride the last years of the Baldwin and Macmillan eras, but it was the first years of each that mattered. In each there was achieved a national consensus in favour of certain necessary but potentially divisive social changes. Any politician who does not firmly believe, as I do, in the basic soundness of the British people's political instincts would do better to cut his throat than remain in politics: given that belief, it is right as well as prudent to seek to understand the sense of these instincts, and to be guided by them when in doubt.

This is indeed what the present Prime Minister is trying, in his own peculiar way, to do. He has not taken Harold Macmillan as his model for nothing. And his behaviour (for policy it can not be called) reflects exactly his own superficial and materialistic conception of human nature, and of the British character in particular. But, of course, the mischief lies in this: so long as the political debate is allowed to remain on a super- ficial and materialistic level, he will get away with it.

Now it is obvious that the Conservative party is experiencing great difficulty in getting to the root of the matter. Certainly the ground is more difficult and uncertain today than in the past. The unprecedented rate and scale of technological innovation have produced changes with which social, economic and liolitical institutions and attitudes have not kept pace. Tradition has almost ceased to be a helpful guide. The social and anti-political malaise is pretty deep-seated.

Yet the difficulties may be more apparent than real. „I have argued elsewhere that the malaise is largely a frustration engendered by the in- creasing scale and complexity of organisation, and by the individual's growing inability, to influence the development of his environment or even gig way. in, which his. needs as, a consumer are met. Whether he is involved in a planning appeal or simply trying to get his electricity bill corrected, he is driven up the wall by the apparent remoteness of the authorities who take the ultimate decisions. To put it crudely, it is a sound British instinct to want to kick someone's bottom when a danger is dropped, and there is nothing more frustrating to this instinct than not to be able to get near the appropriate bottom or even to discover who owns it. You

cannot get to the bottom of a regional board, and still less kick a computer where it hurts.

Nor does this apply only to public authorities and corporations: it is as hard to get satisfaction and redress from large and inefficient industrial concerns as from British Railways.

Thus for Tories simply to talk like technocrats will get them nowhere. God knows modernisa- tion and efficiency are needed, and w ithout doubt Conservatives are in the end more likely to pro- vide them than socialists. But at the moment the ordinary bemused man and woman think that all we mean (and in this they may be more right than we think) is still more size and complica- tion, with their attendant remoteness and frustra- tion. Therefore we should begin with a genuine effort to devolve rather than centralise, to con- sult rather than prescribe, to identify the indi- vidual with society and its processes rather than intensify his dissociation.

This would be a good start towards the essen- tial task of differentiating Tory policy sharply from that of Labour. It would begin by making the ordinary man and woman feel that someone actually took some interest in the problems and frustrations of the individual. The next step is even more important.

It consists simply of pinpointing the most obvious things that are wrong with our society, of saying loudly, repeatedly and without quali- fication that they are wrong. and then pledging the Conservative party to put them right or die in the attempt.

How very naïve! Yes, but what a refreshing change! And, mark you, it would be refresh-

ing to the politicians themselves as well as to the public. Once they were irretrievably committed, they would find it much easier to agree on what to do. After all, few people believed in 1951 that we could build 300,000 houses in a year, So shall we stop pussyfooting about the trade unions, and say what nearly everyone wants us to say—and mean it?

Shall we say that the level and incidence of direct personal taxation are a disgrace and will be radically changed?

Shall we specify radical changes in the social services to meet the changed needs of a full- employment, high-wage society?

Shall we pledge ourselves to brine about a sub- stantial reduction in crime at all cost-. not only

by increased police action, but by eillsting the moral aspirations of ordinary men and women towards decent social behaviour, and by seeking to resolve the dilemmas on the borderlines of parental and educational authority!!

Shall we say firmly that physical ugliness is a sign of a bad society. and that we will not tolerate the creeping blight of subtopia and com- mercial squalor, nor the destruction of familiar beauty: that, indeed, we will not merely dam the flood, but begin reclamation?

There are plenty of other things, of course, but these will do for a start. -If we really. mean them, and sound as if we mean them, they are enough to win an election. They are enough to reunite the Tories, too—left, right and centre. Finally, if we really mean them, we could actually do them. Which is quite a thought in itself.