Patrick Cosgrave on the election
`The trouble with politicians,' said Dr David Butler rather crossly on a recent radio programme, when Mr William Whitelaw and Mr Richard Crossman had reacted with goodhumoured scepticism to some of the conclusions in this book, 'is that they dislike hard evidence that suggests they are less important than they think they are.' For good measure, he argued that the same was true of party organisers and workers. One wonders what hard evidence Dr Butler has for his contention: certainly, as an explanation of the scepticism with which many politicians regard pollsters and psephologists, no argument could be at greater variance from the truth. On the other hand, the contention could be re- versed and applied to political scientists: the hard evidence is the election of June 1970.
To be scrupulously fair to Dr Butler and his new collaborator, however, one must acknowledge that the hew book shows signs of repentance, though their conscious- ness of sin is evident only as an initial queasiness of mind. This manifests itself in the rather becoming confusion with which the great nostrums of psephology, built up by the labours of the Nuffield school over the years, are now expressed. The major Nuffield thesis has always been that effort, by politicians or workers, has little effect on outcome. Naturally, there- fore, we are told on page 335 that organisa- tion did not win the election for the Tories: the small voice of conscience, however, whispering on page ninety-three that it `possibly tipped the balance.' On page ninety-five following priVate polling by the parties is of no great significance, but on page 189 it is 'of major significance.' But, alas, Nuffield predestinarianism still prevails in the tone and manner of the book.
Effort, of course, is one of the essences of politics as professionals see the trade; effort in planning, thought, persuasion, manoeuvre and passion. The elimination of struggle of whatever kind from the concep- tion of politics is the essence of the Nuffield achievement, and is perhaps the main reason why the 137 pages of this book which deal with the history of politics between 1966 and 1970 are such a flat and bland tour d'horizon of a fascinating and exciting period, full of dramatic reversals and incidents.' That those pages are there at all seems to be due less to a desire to have a story to tell, than to an effort to prove the oft-stated conviction that shifts of allegiance between parties take place over a very long period of time, for reasons as yet unplumbed, but certainly different from the ones the politicians favour, and almost certainly untouched by politicians' efforts. For example, loss of faith by their traditional supporters was undoubtedly a crucial factor in Laboutes defeat. The authors mention only that polls showed that such support was being lost. They do not mention the causes of such loss. One of the most important of these causes was the report of the Child Poverty Action Group, essentially Socialist in character, and not discussed at all in the book, which gave birth to the deadly Conservative argu- ment, The poor get poorer under Labour.'
Indeed, one of the most interesting things about the run-up to the election was the final stage of the evolution of a distinct Conservative social welfare stance (in which private polling certainly helped) beginning with Mr Heath's speech at the 1969 Con- ference and gaining powerful momentum with Lord Balniel's party political broad- cast in January. This important theme is not mentioned, let alone discussed, by Dr Butler and Mr Pinto-Duschinsky, though it certainly had a crucial effect on the morale of the Parliamentary Labour party, and may well have had an important in- fluence on the disillusion of Labour workers in the country. The psephologists are in search of more desiccated, more nearly neutral, long-term causes of the June upset.
In this search there is a dog that failed to bark in the night. The 137 pages of rather sloppy narrative could have been replaced by a discussion on class, considered as a deterministically motivating factor in elec- toral politics, working to the advantage of the Labour party, but, really, independent of political effort, which formed the main thesis of Dr Butler's book with Professor Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain. The difficulty is, of course, that the Tories won the June election. And another diffi- culty is that lain Macleod destroyed the whole basis of Butler-Stokes reasoning in a memorable review which showed (a) that the polling on which the book depended was all undertaken at moments peculiarly favourable to the Labour party and (b) that crucial questions were heavily loaded to produce answers that fitted the class thesis. It would be interesting to know whether the June result, Dr Butler's essen- tial honesty, or Mr Pinto-Duschinsky's trained historical sense was the crucial influence in the playing down of the class thesis in this book.
Of course, both Political Change in Britain and The British General Election of 1970 depend heavily on polling for their evidence and argument. It is thus both un- characteristic and unattractive of the two authors of the new book to embark on a lengthy aside designed to separate psephol- ogy from polling at a moment when respect for the pollsters is low; and it is less than straightforward of them to shift uneasily from foot to-foot in handling Mr Humphrey Taylor's brilliantly expressed arguments for a late swing last June, the discovery of which lay behind oac's final swing into line with reality, in their prediction of a Tory victory. The last-minute success of ORC shows at least a willingness on the part of Mr Taylor and his company to be self- critical in changing methods at a late stage : self-criticism' is not a feature of Nuffield psephology. Moreover, the pollsters do not deserve all the disrespect they have suffered. Their record is, on the whole, good, and it is good in the difficult field of prediction; while Nuffield's is weak in the easy field of retrospective ratiocination.
I think it would be fair to say that the Conservative party found oat's work highly valuable up to last June, though it was valuable in a confirmatory and analytical rather than creative way, and its value was as much the product of the undogmatic political acumen of Mr Taylor and his colleagues as of their polling methods. What is at issue now is whether polling methods are sufficiently sophisticated to handle and analyse the present state of national opinion.
The favourite rationalisation of the be- haviour of the polls last June (which is also the point of the late swing theory) is the volatility of the electorate. Volatility covers a multitude of sins: it explains the tem- porary modification of all the Nuffield theses and for it. the authors are dependent on the pollsters, from whom they now seek to dissociate themselves. It is also an un- kind and supercilious word, implying as it does an irrational flirtatious attitude. It is my belief that the electorate are not, in this sense, volatile. Rather, I think, recent years have shown them in a deeply serious, introspective and troubled mood, uncertain about old bearings and seeking new ones. Changes of view during the election cam- paign were less a product of volatility than of a serious and concerned critical indecision before judgment. That neither party de- cisively met the mood is clear enough.
That, specifically, the Conservative victors failed to do so seems to me to have been the product of the fact that Mr Heath was himself making radical changes in the circulation of the party, moved by a spirit similar to but more positive than that of the electorate themselves. His were changes the nature and effect of which could truly be seen only in power, so the electorate found it difficult to form a judgment on them. That they did decide eventually to give him a chance must have been due largely to the unwavering determination with which he held to his line, due, that is, to the effect of a politician.
I believe that some such hypothesis would be accepted by most politicians: it is a pity that Nuffield so steadfastly rejects their evidence. The evidence offered against the hypothesis of interested concern is that turnout fell to 72 per cent, and much is made of this fact by Dr Butler and Mr Pinto-Duschinsky to show the failure of impact of politicians. I am not greatly troubled by this since, on page 342, the authors admit that, allowing for special factors involved in a June election, turnout 'did not really reflect any reduction of interest compared to 1966.' In any event, the hypothesis represents what Macleod called `the real world' of politics, as op- posed to 'the private world' of political science; and the scepticism of politicians for Nuffield's work lies in the recognition that the two worlds rarely meet.
The real difficulty is that psephologists and their methods are too crude to plumb the depths of so complicated a phenomenon as politics. Their rise has been due to the lack of good contemporary writing about politics: with Mr Jenkins's superb
The Battle of Downing Street, Mr Gil- mour's panoramic The Body Politic, Mr Maude's magisterial The Common Problem, Mr Fairlie's vivid The Life of Politics, Mr Worsthorne's metaphysical The Social- ist Myth, their influence may be ending. Meanwhile their conclusions, finally to quote Macleod, are 'of negligible interest except to their own private world.'
Patrick Cosgrove works in the Conservative Research Department
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