Political commentary
A fairly dishonourable retreat
Ferdinand Mount
The logic-choppers at Oxford used to set great store by the Law of the Excluded Middle. Under this law, an assertion was either A or not-A, and there was nothing in between, no nuanced, oblique or qualified response which counted as valid. The law ruled out 'Yes and No', 'Yes but', and 'look here, old boy, you've entirely missed the point'. Party politics is much the same. In the interests of simplicity and of biffing the opposition, large chunks of the argument get left out because it suits neither side to mention them. These Excluded Middles have been embarrassingly conspicuous in the Commons of late. Take the government's spending cuts. For politicians these are either 'savage and inhumane' or 'not-savage and as humane as mother-love and m ittens'.Thc question whether they are cuts at all is alluded to only in passing, if ever.
Mr Whitelaw's new rules to control immigration are either 'sexist, racist and inhumane' or 'non-sexist, non-racist and as humane as etc.' The question whether these rules and the attendant kerfuffle may conceal a wholesale retreat from the Conservatives' election pledges tends to elude attention. Yet of the eight concrete promises in the Tory manifesto, at least four — and much the most important four — appear to have been watered down, dropped or shelved on a very high shelf.
The promise to draw up a list of all wives and children entitled to come here — the Dependants' Register — and the promise to set an annual quota for their entry are both authoritatively pronounced to have 'gone'. The plan for a new British Nationality Act officially survives and Mr Whitelaw says he will publish a White Paper in 1980, but be surprised to see the project go very much further.
All that the government is now doing to live up to its election promises is to• introduce these confoundedly complex rules, the most notorious being the one to keep out only those fiancés who are thought to be up to no good and desiring their brides less for their bodies than for their right of abode. Mr Whitelaw estimates that his icky little rules will in all keep out each year 3,000-4,000 scheming grooms, sponging grandparents and bogus students. My guess is that once you have allowed for compas sionate cases, administrative boobs and low cunning among the would-be entrants, the net figure will be somewhat lower. This compares with the original proposals in Mr Whitelaw's definitive Leicester speech and those of the Select Committee on Immigra tion, which were expected to reduce net immigration by somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 a year. And even that reduction was widely regarded as inadequate, considering the trouble involved.
All this really does look like a humiliating climb-down by the Tories. Mrs Thatcher deliberately adopted immigration as a leading sales point. Hers was to be a 'de-swamping' government. The collapse is all the more marked because, even for a Tory manifesto, the 1979 edition was unusually vague, being mostly composed of the sort of stuff you could underseal your car with. The immigration pledges by comparison shone like Sir Denys Lasdun's pre-stressed concrete before the rain got at it.
There is no mystery about why they have collapsed. The Home Office has always said that a Register would prove expensive, bothersome and incomplete. Lord Franks's three-man committee — which included Mark Carlisle, now Mrs Thatcher's Education Secretary — said that at best a Register could have included only half the dependants legitimately admitted in 1975. If you accept that objection, then a quota would not be much use either, because without a Register you would not have the names to arrange in your orderly queue. So bang go the Register and the Quota.
The British Nationality Act continues to founder on precisely that rock which it is primarily designed to circumnavigate, to wit, Hong Kong. For behind the admirable purpose of defining in law who the British are and thus allaying fears and doubts, lies the grosser design of keeping out the Yellow Peril if China should assert her rights over the Colony when the lease runs out. Can't be done, it seems, or the Home Office can't be bothered to, which comes to the same thing, for these matters are fantastically complicated and no mere politician can master them, with the possible exceptions of Mr Enoch Powell and Mr Alex Lyon.
What the government has done instead is to raise the barrier against enterprising Hong Kong entrepreneurs by specifying £100,000 as the sum which a businessman must show before he can obtain permission to set up shop here. Under the old rules, you could start a take-away in Walsall by showing the immigration authorities as little as £10,000, but 100Gs is a different class of money.
The Tories are thus forced to resort to hasty and undignified loophole-blocking measures instead of fulfilling their promise to provide, on high legal ground, that principled and definite prospect of 'the end of immigration as we have seen it in these post-war years.' And with this goes also something just as devoutly to be wished for, an end to immigration legislation which always causes backbench revolts; references to the European Court and all manner of unpleasantness. In other words, this is a failure in spades.
Yet not a word about this U-est of U-turns came from the Labour benches when the new rules were debated. Among the Tories only a few Right-wingers referred to the possibility that Mr Whitelaw and Mr Raison might be welshing. It's not as if there was no warning. As early as the Conservative Party Conference, Mr Raison was to be observed with his sneakers on and preparing for a nippy getaway.
Mrs Thatcher is now feeling the consequences of her disingenuous television interview last year. She aroused expectations of tight controls on a scale which it was well-known at the time, though conceivably not by her because she did not then seem to know much about the subject, that no Tory government would be likely to deliver. Not only had the Franks Committee already pointed out the snags in the Register; back in the Heath days, the Tories had already wrestled vainly with ideas for a new British Nationality Bill.
But Labour MPs do not care to draw attention to the Conservatives originallintention for fear that, however betrayed it might have been, it would at least remind voters that the Conservative Party is in theory 'tougher on immigration.'Hence Mrs Thatcher has so far got off lightly with her fairly dishonourable retreat.
There, you see, as the Observer so shrewdly observed, this column is not to be bought by invitations to Number Ten, Downing Street. The more copious the cocktails and canapes, the sterner our rectitude. All the same, it would be churlish not to say what a gracious occasion it was. Mr Denis Thatcher was most attentive. The ex-Min-of-Works Corots positively glowed on the flock wallpaper. I glimpsed Miss Jean Rook talking to Mr Bryan Forbes (he is in films). Mr Arthur Askey, looking remarkably fit and rather like Lord Carrington but not quite so tall, tells me that he will not be playing Widow Twankey this year but Alderman Fitzwarren instead. Standing bY a particularly delightful arrangement of white chrysanthemums, I spied Mr `JimrilY Saville who kissed my wife's hand with a delightfully old-fashioned gesture. Among• others I saw enjoying this large and livelY gathering were Mr Eric Sykes, Professor' Robert Conquest with his charming bride, Lulu (no, I don't mean she's the new Robert Conquest how does Jennifer avows this comma-dilemma?), Mr and Mr5t George Gale (he has a most amusing 'eh% show' on the wireless) and Mr Ivi°stY (Moss) Evans. Among those I saw it° enjoying this large and lively gathering 'weir.; Mr David Basnett and Dr Roy Strong, looked as if the company was not what th Y had expected. Still, you can't please everY' body,
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