Last word
Back to Front
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
There were several good bets to have on the general election (and a number of bad ones. Not a month passes but the bookmakers find some new way to rip off the public: predicting to within three the number of seats that the Tories will win is as much a matter of intellectual judgment as guessing the number of beans in a basin.) There were also, what is not quite the same thing, several safe predictions. Two of the safest were that the National Front would be routed, and that the Left would immediately come up with new reasons for claiming that the Front was a grave and immediate menace.
I may seem like Peter Simple's racing tipster — who invariably naps the winner of the Derby, but whose copy is always delayed until the next day —but it is not from mere self-satisfaction that I point out that both predictions have been fulfilled: it is relevant to my argument. In reply to those who proclaimed the danger of the Front, some of us said that the best thing to do was, in Lord George-Brown's memorable expression, to treat it with a complete ignoral. Leave them alone and they'll go away.
Well, we were right. The Front did go away. In those Greater London seats which it contested in October 1974 it won 4.0 per cent of the votes cast. This time the figure was 2.0 per cent, not the least of the happy events which 3 May brought. In the 303 seats which the Front fought it managed just 1.3 per cent of the popular vote. Today it is not so much a fringe party as a joke party.
Now for the second part of the prophesy. You might have thought that the collapse of the Front would be greeted with delight by the Left. Well, you wouldn't have thought that if you knew the Left, and in particular the New Statesman. I do not join in the fashionable dispraise of the New Statesman, but I worry about it. There is the Dr Jekyll of the leader page, mumbling inarticulately about 'libertarian socialism', but then, further on, there is usually a Mr Hyde lurking with the traditional motto of the authoritarian Left: if it moves, ban it.
Last week there were two Mr Hydes. First there was a leaderette recommending that the Front should be forbidden to use the Union Jack. We need not take this piece too seriously, appearing as it did over the by-line of Mr Christopher Hitchens. For those not au courant with the Weekly World I should explain. One by one, the young blades have left the Statesman — for Charlottenburg-les-deux-Eglises or for peripatetic tax exile — but Christopher has pluckily stayed behind to become Bruce Page's Sancho Panza. It may reasonably be assumed that his latest squib—which begins with the sentence 'Socialists on the whole have no great sympathy for the sight of the Union Jack' — was written in his role as Great Turnstile's resident farceur.
The second article is another matter, though, indeed, not less risible in its way. At first sight, it might be taken for an elaborate spoof, from the implausible by-line 'Christopher T. Husbands and Jude England' to the final preposterous set of tables. Our writers begin with the Front's electoral debacle, about which they can scarcely conceal their chagrin. They then set about showing, with hilarious methods, that it 'may be premature' to dismiss the Front as a political force.
Their argument is summed up by the headline over one of the tables: 'The broad appeal of National Front policies'. What you do is to ask some voters whether they think that the death penalty is sometimes justified (the Front naturally favours hanging). It transpires that 86 per cent of Front supporters think so — and so do 86 per cent of Conservative voters, 81 per cent of Labour and 93 per cent of Liberals. Hey presto: 'With policy positions which fall firmly into the mainstream of public opinion, there is the disquieting possibility of the NF's resurgance.'
This is as if you showed that more than 80 per cent of Benedictine monks, of members of the Soviet Communist Party and of lesbian mothers liked chocolate and preferred sunshine to rain, and that therefore. . . Oh, well. It reminds me of that poster you used to see in the tube which went something like this: 'Answer these questions: 1: Have you ever had a drink before noon? 2: Have you ever felt that you really needed a drink? 3: Have you ever suffered from the ill-effects of drinking the next day? 4: Have you ever really wanted a drink? If you answer yes to one or more of these questiohs,perhaps you need help.'
But it is not the methodological absurdity of Messrs Husbands and England (or perhaps Ms England?) which is most alarming. It is the conclusion to which all their silly statistics and their turgid prose are directed. Not content with keeping our proud flag out of the fascists' hands they want to proscribe the National Front. Not content with the Race Relations Act, 1976, which allows for the prosecution of individuals for incitement to racial hatred, they want to ban organisations of a racist character.
This is an argument which we are going to see much more of in future; I was saddened but not surprised to see the Tablet last week also calling for the Front to be banned. (When, after all, has the Roman Catholic church led the fight for unconditional free speech, or defended the rights of those with whom it disagreed?). We will see a good deal of specious reasoning in support of proscription, and we will see a good deal of rewritten (or at least misinterpreted) history. It is to that subject in particular — and to the subject of freedom of expression in general — that I shall return next week.
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