15 OCTOBER 1965, Page 8

Strip-Tease Politics

By CHARLES CURRAN, MP BRITAIN used to be a pyramid society. The ruling few were at the top, and the money- less masses at the bottom. We are turning into a diamond society, where the middle classes predominate—in purchasing power, trend-setting and votes. Toryism was once the party of the apex. Since 1945, it has been fighting a battle for the diamond. Now Labour, coming from the foot of the pyramid, reaches up for the same prize. How do the rivals compare? One way to assess that is by looking at their annual confer- ences: for these gatherings are strip-tease per- formances. Each party then exposes itself with the gusto of Miss Rose Lee in her prime. You are shown the men and women who run the machines in the constituencies. You see what kind of people they are, and what is the stuff to give them. I have been looking at them for twenty years, and I want to offer some im- pressions.

Every Tory conference since the war has re- vealed the same thing; that a continuous pro- cess of social expansion is at work inside the constituency parties. Year by year, the class composition of the conference widens. It is not yet a mirror-image of the electorate, but it is evolving into one; and it can now claim to be probably the most representative assembly in Britain. It approximates far more closely to the mirror-image than does the House of Commons. There are only twenty-eight women among 630 MPs. At the Tory conference, women represen- tatives are as numerous as men.

This is not contrived; but it is not accidental, either. It happens because women take a leading part in many (if not most) constituency parties. For Toryism now has a firm grasp of four basic truths about British politics. These are: that there is a whole sex consisting entirely of women; that they all have votes; that they outnumber, the male voters; and that most of them prefer to vote right. Female suffrage has given the panty a built-in bonus. Without it, the Tories would probably not have won a general election since the war, and would probably never win another. The sex ratio is one distinguishing character-

istic of their conference. The age ratio is another. About one-third of the participants are now under thirty. This proportion is far higher than it was in the late 1940s. Since then, the spread of the Young Conservatives, and of university Toryism, has changed the face of the confer- ence. With the decline of CND, the YCs are left with no rival as the most magnetic youth movement in our politics. There is a rapid turn- over in their membership, because of early marriage and the shortage of baby-sitters. The constituency parties are therefore constantly irrigated by a fresh intake.

The growth of our diamond society is reflected in the rising proportion of young people at the Tory conference. They are the products of the educational escalator, first-generation members of the enlarging middle classes; managers, tech- nicians, executives, founders of businesses, organisation men. For them, the traditional Toryism of Church and Empire means nothing; it is as dead as Baldwin and Curzon. As the beneficiaries of change and opportunity, they want more of both.

Post-war Toryism has made strenuous efforts to get recruits from the army of trade unionists who vote for it, but do not join it. These have been partially successful, no more. The first arrivals were greeted with comic exuberance. A conference speaker who began 'I am a trade unionist' aroused as much enthusiasm as a virgin in a barrack-room. Today, he would get im- patient laughter. Trade unionist representatives are now numerous enough to be taken for granted—though there are not nearly as many as the party would like.

The note of the conference remains middle- class. But it now contains all sorts (though the Peter Pan cartoonists have not discovered that)— including Lewis Eliot, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Joe Lampton, Lord George Hell, the Provincial Lady, and the latest model in pussycats. Each year, the mix becomes..more variegated.

There has been no similar evolution in the Labour conference. Its composition has stayed the same for twenty years. Blackpool this year was very much what it was in 1945; a gathering that is mainly male, mainly middle-aged and

'Me? One of the rich?—Honestly, fellows, you don't know what a joke that would be to my accountant.'

mainly working-class or ex-working-class.

Women delegates were as few as ever. They were scattered through the hall like coral islands in the Pacific. They seemed to number abuut one in ten of the total. ''Where are the girls?' said an indignant American observer. 'Not a popsie in sight.') The proportion of young delegates was higher, but not much. My im- pression is that the age-level of the Labour con- ference has risen over the past decade. Most of the under-thirties at Blackpool were outside the hall, pressing propaganda for rival products on the people going in. All the sects of the left were there, among them the Independent Labour Party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Labour League, the Connolly Asso- ciation, and the three kinds of Communist— Stalinist, Trotskyite. Pekingese. These swarms are a feature of the Labour conference only; there is no equivalent to them when Tories meet.

What kind of people are these Labour dele- gates from the constituencies and the unions? Some of them are hard-faced men who look as if they had done well out of the class war. To judge from accents, they are mainly made up of two groups. They come from the old industrial areas of Wales, the north of England, and Scot- land; or they are migrants from those areas. At Blackpool, as at every other post-war Labour conference, the Welsh migrants were particularly audible. This is not surprising. They now seem to fuel and power the Labour machine in pretty well every constituency from Bristol to Hammer- smith Broadway.

The atmosphere of the Labour conference does not change, any more than its composition. It remains a rally of Us against Them. It sees politics as primarily a matter of making Them do something for Us. Its concern is with distri- bution, not producing. Looking at it and listen- ing to it, you see the improbability of supposing that this party will eyer go overboard for com- petitive efficiency. It does not want dynamism, or flexible blueprints. In its collective conscious' ness, it mourns for the feudal lord who fed and cared for his vassals. It yearns to replace him by the Santa Claus state. Its secret dream is the mink-lined soup kitchen—cost-free, draught' proof, with instant service, wallpaper music, and I chips with everything.

At Blackpool this year, its father figure was Aneurin Bevan. He now enjoys a posthumous charisma among all sections of the party that must make his ghost chuckle. There is no such afterglow about Gaitskell. But Bevan's words still echo. Speaker after speaker intoned Priorities are the language of Socialism.' Mr. Callaghan is even invoked that text in order to stall off Mr' Michael Foot's plea for steel nationalisation;

a feat that suggested the seething of a kid in his mother's milk.

Mr. Harold Wilson probed the party's collet' dive unconscious with a head-shrinker'sskill' He triggered off all the resentments of Us versus

,

Them—not by attacking wealth, but by attack" ing the habits of people who have it, and vvit°e get into the gossip columns. He may ign°r,

steel, but he will seize the silver spoon. It is n°: capitalism that is the enemy, so much as club' land and the Caprice. Mr. Wilson sounded as if his theme song would soon be 'I've got 5

White's man working for me now.' Of You hear no counterpoint to that kind melody at the Tory conference. For here I coat to the root difference between the two gatherilleg Toryism feels in its bones that it is a goVeralii, party. Labour does not. It remains—and Black pool confirmed this—a band of Elijahs Wait for ravens.