POLITICS
Time for Mrs Thatcher to consummate her Union
NOEL MALCOLM
Asecret memorandum from Con- servative Central Office landed on my desk last week. Its contents, if genuine, will send shock-waves through the length and breadth (well, mainly the length) of the United Kingdom. For what it proposes is nothing leis than the complete withdrawal of the Conservative Party from the Scottish political system.
The impetus for this decision must have come from the Govan by-election, with its extraordinary triumph for the SNP and its ignominious halving of the vote for the Tory candidate. If the SNP is now capable of mounting such a successful challenge in such a 'safe' seat, then the central question at Scottish elections henceforth is bound to be the constitutional one on which the SNP campaigns: independence or Union? Labour, for all its ditherings over devolu- tion, is still a Unionist party in Scotland; and in the great majority of seats it will be the only realistic bulwark against the SNP. This is why the secret memorandum warns that putting up Conservative candidates at the next general election 'would split the pro-Union vote'. Behind this noble sacrifice at the altar of the Union there lurks a more ignoble line of reasoning, concerned with pounds, pence and pragmatism. 'Parties', the memorandum asserts' rather defensively, `exist to win elections. And Parties have every right to consider whether it makes practical sense for them to put up candi- dates in particular constituencies'. To in- vest in all the costly machinery of elec- tioneering, 'without much prospect of win- ning any Parliamentary seats', would be `an enormous diversion of time and re- sources'. It would make it 'more difficult to concentrate our efforts on winning a majority for the Prime Minister at the next General Election in areas where it counts'.
Some of the reasoning contained in this document is hard to fault; but its overall attitude to the nature of politics — and, indeed, to the political identity of the United Kingdom in the long term — will strike many Conservatives as repugnant. So repugnant that many, no doubt, will cling, to the hope that the whole thing is some sort of spoof.
Well, half of it is, anyway. I confess — I made up the bit about Scotland. But the quotations I have given come from a genuine document issued by Conservative Central Office on the day of the Govan by-election. It is a letter written by Sir Peter Lane, chairman of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Asso- ciations, giving his reasons for refusing to affiliate the newly established Conserva- tive Association of North Down in North- ern Ireland. Of course it is cheating a little to turn this argument round and point it at Scotland; of course there are real differ- ences between the two cases — such as the absence of Labour and the SLD from Northern Ireland as well.
But if, as I suspect, most English people will feel that there is no point at all in trying out arguments about Ulster on Scotland or Wales instead, then that must suggest that a significant change has come about in the political culture of this coun- try: people have somehow lost the disposi- tion — or the will — to think in general terms about the nature of the Union. All such thinking has become compartmental- ised and provincialised. And this has hap- pened even in the Conservative and Un- ionist party, which seems, like Mr Anthony Wedgewood Benn, to have become sud- denly ashamed of its double-barrelled name. (Readers of the Daily Telegraph, where Mr Benn appears under his full name, will be glad to know that in the cuttings library of that paper all references to the Conservative Party are filed under `II'. This, as they say, is the exception which proves the rule.) It was not ever thus. From the 1880s to the 1920s, it was quite normal to discuss Ireland and Scotland in the same breath. Arginnents about Home Rule in Ireland were interwoven and transposed with those about the creation of a Scottish Parlia- ment. Bills for Home Rule in Scotland passed their second readings in the House of Commons in 1908, 1911, 1912 and 1913. And the debate on the Government of Scotland Bill of 1920 is an essential part of the background to the Government of Ireland Act of the same year, which created the modern entity of Northern Ireland. Present-day Conservatives, such as Sir Peter Lane, like to regard the separateness of Ulster's political life as a fact of nature. The Northern Ireland Office likes to regard the creation of a separate mini-parliament at Stormont as a natural and necessary part of any attempt to 'solve' the Ulster problem. But when Ulster Un- ionists such as Carson were asked original- ly, in 1920, whether they wanted a parlia- ment of their own, they said no. They did not want any kind of unique status. In the end they were persuaded only by Lloyd George's promise that Home Rule in Ulster would he the first step in a move towards the creation of a federal Britain, with equal measures of Home Rule to be introduced later in Scotland, Wales and England. Anyone interested in this crucial piece of political history should read the pamphlet by Eamon Dyas on the 1920 Act recently published by the Institute for Representa- tive Government (29 Church Road, New- tonbieda, Belfast). I confine myself to quoting from one of Carson's speeches in the House of Commons which it contains: We have never asked to govern any Catholic. We are perfectly satisfied that all of them, Protestant and Catholic, should be governed from this Parliament, and we have always said that it was the fact that this Parliament was aloof entirely from these racial distinc- tions and religious distinctions which was the strongest foundation for the government of Ulster.
There, in the long-term, lies the rationale for trying to incorporate the people of Northern Ireland into the party- political system of Great Britain. The Conservative Party, which always tells people to think in the long term when they criticise the Anglo-Irish Agreement, has displayed a curiously short-term attitude towards the would-be Conservatives of North Down.
And what of the long term in Scotland? There the major parties are still trying to decide whether Govan portends a shift away from British party politics towards politics on the Nationalist-Unionist model. If a shift occurs, the main upheavals Will take place in the Labour Party, where pressure is growing to start running with the Nationalist hare — at least as far as a Scottish Assembly with real, non- subordinate, legislative powers. The Con- servative view is that a shift to Nationalist- Unionist politics would be bad for Scotland but good for the Tories. In Scotland, at least, they are still unashamed of their Unionism. Mrs Thatcher spelt it out for them at Perth this year: 'People say we're not a Scottish party. But neither are we an English party, nor a Welsh party, nor an Irish party. We are a party of the whole United Kingdom'. I just wonder what they make of that in North Down.
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