The day of reckoning
What the nation wants, if the more extreme opinion polls published in the final phase of the election campaign are to be believed, is another long spell of Labour u.overnment supported by an overwhelm- ing majority, with the Tory opposition reduced to a dispirited rump. None of our readers will suppose this is what the SPECTATOR wants. Much more important, even if the most extravagant of predic- tions ptove to be accurate, we shall still not believe that it is in any deep sense what the nation wants either. It is one thing for a brilliant electioneering per- former like Mr Wilson, operating in a month blessed alike by meteorology and economics, to generate a sense of well- being. It is another thing altogether to conclude that a wave of skilfully stimu- lated euphoria represents either a con- sidered judgment on six years of disap- pointing government, or a calculated decision on how Britain should tackle the problems of the 1970s.
Year after year, the indicators of public opinion (including by-elections) have an- nounced the country's dissatisfaction. Can it be that one election campaign, an elec- tion, moreover, dominated throughout by questions of personality, has wholly con- verted that persistent dissatisfaction into a grateful approval? So we are encouraged to believe. It is not a proposition which we find believable. If Mr Wilson's govern- ment is returned to office, it will not be long before the old discontent re-emerges. The sunshine will fade, the ugly side of the present galloping inflation will become apparent, the burden of taxation will grow more oppressive, the familiar failure to create the extra wealth demanded by ris- ing popular expectations will generate an increasing sense of grievance. It is a safe forecast that the sense of national frustra- tion which has bedevilled our recent his- tory will swiftly replace the complacency which Mr Wilson has so adroitly fostered.
To what extent the electorate is aware of this prospect is a matter for guesswork. Most probably people do suspect that the Present pros"perity based upon un- restrained wage inflation cannot possibly last, but they hope that somehow thing" will at least not be quite as bleak as they have been. Meanwhile they can enjoy themselves--and also enjoy Mr Wilson's entertaining, not to say flippant, elec- tioneering virtuosity. It remains possible, if not probable, as we go to press, that the Conservatives could still penetrate this mood to persuade people to take a more realistic look at their present position and their prospects. This week's Un- pleasant trade figures could have jolted them into recognising that the dangers are much greater than Mr Wilson and Mr Jenkins have disclosed. There is just a whiff of 1966 in the air. And yet, of course, good news is always more acceptable than warnings, however well founded.
For all that, the Conservatives can justly claim to be more likely than Labour to put new energy into the economy and thus to produce the conditions in which extra wealth can be created. They can claim, on their record, to be better at achieving a higher level of growth of industrial pro- duction; they can claim, on their record, to be far better at cutting taxes. And their case for recommending a revitalising change of approach at this election has been further emphasised by the vagueness, not to say emptiness, of the Labour pros- pectus.
This is not changed by the respective talents of the main party leaders as tele- vision stars or electioneering glad-handers. On this front Mr Wilson has carried off most of the applause and Mr Heath has had to undergo many harsh words. Be- fore the last act of the affair, however, it ought to be said that the country owes some gratitude to Mr Heath whatever the result may be. He has tried to conduct the election as a decent and rational debate. As a campaigner he is not as amusing as Mr Wilson (whom one supporter likened the other day to a great music hall comedian); but then he has paid the electorate the compliment of treating its problems and its future with utter serious- ness. It is his, and his party's, misfortune that he has done so at a time when serious- ness is out of fashion. Mr Heath has also stood courageously for tolerance and sanity at aitime when those virtues, too, are under attack from many directions.
No other modern Tory leader has had to fight an election while yoked to so difficult a colleague as Mr Enoch Powell. He has made it plain that Mr Powell could never serve under him in a Tory government: in turn Mr Powell seems scarcely to be in- terested in a Tory government unless he himself is at the head of it. It is an arrogant and unappealing attitude, just as Mr Powell's implied claim to a monopoly among public men of truth and wisdom is arrogant and unappealing. And if the supposition is correct that Mr Powell is striking out now for the Tory leadership after the debacle he foresees, then Mr Powell, for all his supposed concern with realism, is revealing a strangely unrealistic view of his own position.
It remains true, however, that if some sort of vacuum did not exist in our politics today then Mr Powell would never have been tempted to try to fill it. Elections and political arguments are naturally enough about bread-and-butter issues for much of the time, but they should not be exclusively concerned with such topics. Mr Powell's special talent is to identify and articulate what many ordinary people are, uncertainly and imperfectly no doubt. aware of as causes for anxiety or for questioning. The fact that on occasion he exceeds what is politically and intellectually respectable no doubt helps him to attract an audience (if not to persuade it). His lan- guage in recent days prompted Mr Heath to make an admirable, Disraelian sum- mary of his ideals for the Tory party: it is a pity that Mr Heath almost seemed to need prompting by a maverick colleague to sound this note. It is what has been lacking on all sides. Perhaps Mr Powell, even in bringing about his bwn isolation, has performed the Conservative party the service of forcing it to look more deeply into the state of the nation and the nature of its opportunity to serve the nation. Patriotism is at present outmoded and is, in any event, by itself not enough. But neither are the politics of the grocery bill enough.
Although commentators have tended to treat the election result as a foregone conclusion, there is at least one good reason for retaining a scrap of prudent doubt until the last minute. As never before in recent times, the political debate has been subordinated to what will come to seem, and probably quickly, absurdly trivial questions of personality and tran- sient public mood. At such a time who knows how long the spell will last? What- ever happens, we will hope to be spared another general election in quite this un- real and uninspiring mode.
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