Political Commentary
One man's conversion
John Grigg When we were lunching together the other day Patrick Cosgrave reproached me for having never given a full explanation of my reasons for objecting to the 'new' or 'radical' Right, and I promised to make amends at the earliest opportunity. To assist my thoughts he very kindly gave me a book of essays, so far published only in America (The Future That Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failures in Britain, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr: Doubleday, 86.95), to which he is a contributor.
The new Right is characterised above all by its fervent propagation of the doctrine (itself far from new) of economic liberalism, and in his essay—entitled 'The Failure of the Conservative Party, 1945-75'—Dr Cosgrave tells us that Enoch Powell 'undoubtedly prepared the way for Mrs Thatcher and her close ally, Sir Keith Joseph, to assert more moderate versions of his own doctrine of economic liberalism, and repudiate the heritage of postwar conservatism.' This statement is of special interest, because Dr Cosgrave is . not only himself a forceful spokesman for the new Right, but also a political aide and impending biographer of Mrs Thatcher.
He is, it must be said, a fairly recent convert to economic liberalism, and he brings to it all the passionate and somewhat blinkered intensity of the convert. Readers of the Spectator will remember his account (22 January 1977) of attending an Institute of Economic Affairs lunch towards the end of 1969, when he met Keith Joseph for the first, and Enoch Powell for the second, time. Their effect upon him, reinforcing that of the delightful IEU pundits, Ralph Harris, Arthur SeldOn and John Wood, was immediate and decisive. It was, for him, 'the exact equivalent of St Paul's famous stop on the road to Damascus.'
Now politics, surely, is very different from religion, and anyone who feels that he has had a sudden revelation of political truth is likely to be deceiving himself badly; all the more so when the supposed truth is not in the broad and proper sense political, but takes the form of an economic theory. Economics should seldom be treated'as even the prime determinant of politics, and never as the sole determinant. Moreover, Tories should always be on their guard against theories of any kind.
Economic liberalism must not be confused with economic liberty. If the two were synonymous there would be no argument. Dr Cosgrave defines the attitude of the I EA at the time of his conversion as scorn for public expenditure, adoration of pure market forces, preoccupation with micro-economics and contempt for the whole record of the Conservative Party under Mr Macmillan. To this he would add his own 'furious sense of betrayal' at Mr Heath's abandonment of the Selsdon policy in 1972. In his view the crucial task facing the next Conservative government will be 'to find a way of rolling back the power of the state.'
He and his fellow-doctrinaires dream of the time when the state intervened in the economy only to raise very modest taxes and to enforce certain necessary codes of conduct. But it happens that the period when the state was least interventionist and the market mechanism least controlled—the second half of the nineteenth century—was the period when British industry ,entered upon its much-lamented process of decline. And when the dogma of economic liberalism began to be seriously questioned, one of the most powerful voices raised against it was not that of a socialist, but that of an outstandingly successful self-made capitalist, Joseph Chamberlain.
The Selsdon programme which, Dr Cosgrave believes, Mr Heath disgracefully abandoned, was an attempt to return to the magic and discipline of pure market forces in circumstances vastly less favourable than those in which such forces had been found wanting before. Of course there was a case— and it is stronger today—for a relative shift in the balance of the economy as between the public and private sectors; as between the just claims of the state and the just claims of individuals and firms. But nothing in the nature of an economic counterrevolution is remotely possible, granted the general acceptance of the state's duty to promote welfare and to protect the weak, and granted the moral legitimacy of the state that follows from universal suffrage.
Though I would certainly not suggest that all was right in the second phase of Mr Heath's premiership—quite apart from the shattering explosion of world commodity prices, and the government's inept reaction to it—and though I would not suggest that all was wrong in the early, Selsdonian phase, it seems to me entirely obvious that the better and more truly Tory period was the second and not, as Dr Cosgrave and his school assert, the first. And it should not be forgotten that, just as the businessman Joseph Chamberlain turned against 'pure' economic liberalism in its heyday, so businessmen were among the bitterest critics of the Selsdon experiment and its consequences.
Dr Cosgrave is apt to use 'socialism' and 'collectivism' as more or less interchangeable, and anyway pejorative, terms. But to a large extent, surely, both are inevitable aspects of democracy and modern economic organisation, and to that extent it is true to
Spectator 16 April 1977 . say that 'we are all socialists now'. The.Word' 'collectivism' calls to mind the growth of trade unions and the right to bargain collectively, which has enabled millions of individuals, whose economic liberty was gravely restricted by economic liberalism, to emancipate themselves from drudgery and poverty.
The experience of France since the war hardly supports the over-simplified doctrine of our latter-day economic liberals. General de Gaulle always maintained that the future of civilisation, in the economic sphere, laY neither in communism nor in capitalisnl, but in co-operation; and one of his first acts as head of the provisional government was to back Pleven's flexible policy against the rigid economic purity of Mendes-France. This decision undoubtedly helped him t° dish the Communists, at a time when their threat was most formidable.
Under successive governments France has shown confidence in public as well as private enterprise, in the value of planning and in the virtue of a bureaucratic elite. Call it be mere coincidence that France's GNP is now substantially larger than ours, despite her substantially smaller population ? The Conservative Party has made errors and missed opportunities since the war, but the idea that its whole postwar heritage should be repudiated, as Dr Cosgrave tells us Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher are repudiating it, is too preposterous for words. There have, in fact, been only two calarair tously false steps in the Tory record since 1945. One was Suez and the other was Selsdon. Nothing could be more inappropriate or contrary to the tradition of the party MI that it should become dogmatically opP°se. to the state and pledged to diminishing It.5 role rather than to making it more efficient' The Tory Party, unlike the Liberal PariY' has always had a healthy belief in the state. The old toast, 'Church and King,' may 11 paraphrased 'God and the State,' and it wad much to the credit of the more entightene Tories in the nineteenth century that they were iarseoperel poppaurerdtsoeusse the power of the state The paramount need in Britain today is not for the application of a new—still lcrvss of a stale and rehashed—economY but rather for a revival of patriotism and tti.,1 sense of national unity. To achieve this vi!!, be difficult enough even if no gratuitonsi_Y, controversial and divisive policies are intr°f duced. If they are, there will be no hope its being achieved. d the Instead of 'rolling back the power 'ld state,' the next Tory government shoter seek to reassert its authority, now elangthe ously eroded, and should do so bY titu, intelligent process of adapting its ins the tions to new forces and pressures in nt community. The next Tory governill'est should also show such enthusiastic intet._ in the public sector„ and such zeal totrof prove its performance, that dogma
he left will gradually be shamed into acc'r ing the mixed economy.
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