Political Commentary
Counter-revolution coming
Patrick Cosgrave It is three and a half years since I began to write this column. Since Parliament is in recess, and since there are only two weeks to go before I finish my stint as political correspondent I thought I would spend my last two columns trying to describe something of what I think has happened in British politics over the last few years.
The most important—and in many respects the most obvious—development between Mr Wilson's first general election victory and today is he awareness on the part of British politicians of how diminished the strength and the international standing of the country are. True, there are still a number of gifted politicians who are deeply concerned about international affairs, and about Britain's potential, whether in Europe or Africa. But the general assumption— however false or unreliable it was even then —of 1964 that Britain was still a major international power, possessing the capacity to influence or overturn events even in far corners of the world,bas almost wholly disappeared. Mr Eric Sevareid can still annoy and upset us when, in however friendly a fashion, he criticises our shortcomings as a society; but the notorious remark of Mr Dean Acheson would pass unnoticed today.
One of the reasons for this is a simple and obvious decline of power—something that was inevitable once the USSR and the United States had flexed their muscles and found their strength. But there is very little doubt that the loss of a world vision has deeply impoverished British politics. There are still those, particularly in the Labour Party, who conceive it to be their duty to take a moralistic stand on more or less everything that happens more or less everywhere: but their posturings are evidently vain; and their preaching tedious. The unforced and confident assumptions of knowledge and understanding about the operation of power in the world (far less a matter of telling other societies how they ought to behave than of guiding them in what was in their interest) has almost gone from British politics.
But power is not everything. Of greater consequence has been the debilitating domestic struggle waged by every Br itish government since 1960. With very brief interruptions of optimism governments. Conservative and Labour alike, have struggled to overcome depressing economic failure and restore industrial stability to Britain. When I began to write this column we were beginning to realise that the bravest of the various experiments in revival that we have had since the war—the quiet revolution of Mr Heath—was being abandoned. I will not now repeat my view of the reasons why it
was abandoned, and why Mr Heath opted instead for a collectivist and syndicalist approach to the difficulties he faced. But it is worth observing that he, like every other Prime Minister who has met with failure, blamed somebody else for what went wrong. A/lea eulpei is a phrase unknown to modern British politicians.
And this refusal to admit error bespeaks not arrogance, but lack of self-confidence. Especially in the Conservative Party the commonest stance of politicians of reflective bent today is the expression of belief in the insuperability of circumstances; or the impossibility of persuading some section of society—usually the trade unionists—to go along with what it is believed are eminently sensible government policies. Though there has been much talk in the last few years of declining public confidence in politicians, there has been a far more marked decline of confidence of politicians in themselves. There has also, of course, been a great deal of discussion of weaknesses in the British political system (and that subject I will return to next week). Of this subject it need only be said now that the apex of the British system is the performance of six hundred-odd individuals working in the Palace of Westminster; and if they and the more prominent among them are not both confident and skilful then the system will not work.
Especially it will not work if the leaders of the party in power in Westminster delegate their strategic functions. In the last twelve years there has been a positive Gadarene rush to devolve political and parliamentary functions. Perhaps most notably there has been (this began after the war) the permitted mushrooming of the power of planners, about which Mr Christopher Booker has written so eloquently in these pages in recent weeks. But Mr Heath and Mr Wilson in particular have vied with everybody else in setting up boards, committees and institutions of various kinds, all performing, in a supposedly neutral and expert way, functions which in previous generations were rightly regarded as lying solely within the political province. I am not, here, simply throwing brickbats at the Treasury (though, God knows, it deserves every brick in my hod). Rather, I am drawing attention to the huge proliferation of independent institutions (though their existence, of course, hugely and dangerously increases Prime Ministerial patronage) from the Prices and Incomes Board to the National Enterprise Board. The common feature of all these bodies is that they never—they cannot— fulfil the expectations visited on them.
Now. I am as sensible as the next man of
the fact that modern industrial society is good deal more complex than that of the, nineteenth century; and that the concept °I government as a referee held by Plantagene,t Palliser is unsuitable to our times. BUt does not follow that the state should tc, the ultimate regulating force in so 1118,11> areas of life. As Hayek wrote in The Roaar° Solcloni (reprinted this week by Routledge and Kegan Paul at £3.50 and cheap price) this movement towards. statism been powerful for a large part of tbi5 century; and it is of its nature inimical Of everything that even now we hold to he value in the Western tradition, particulan; its cultivation of individualism. Like se, many collectivists today Auguste CO hated individualism, and referred to Illae perennial Western malady, the revolt of Individual against the species'.`Wha,t,,--ca Hayek adds—`the nineteenth centurY ac°,04 to the individualism of the preceding Peri was merely to make all classes conscious", freedom, to develop systematically and ct)rdil tinuously what had grown in a haPhala and patchy manner and to spread it froPe England and Holland over most of ,11111 European continent.' What the twentieth century has seen, particularly in the triu10, of the two great left-wing ideologies, C°1 munisrn and Nazism, is the reversal of trwi trend, and the subjection of the indivild° to the state. This may seem an excessive staternell and, to be sure, there is no indication thh°e British collectivism has anything like missionary urges of Nazism and Cd% munism. But the advance of bureauctlei, Into our private affairs—inefficient thotet It may be—has been the most imPortørily development of the last decade. Now, statist—that is, truly totalitarian—rec , can in certain areas, principally the militar. enjoy great success: by the crushing of di , sent they can achieve many of their Oth estic aims. What has saved Britain front hrLs the successes and the failures of exc'i, statism has been the survival of parliatne.n4 ary democracy, and the deep and ab1r5 affection in which our people hold it continued existence, too, gives us Wile hope of achieving—as we achieved in.tv, seventeenth century—a revolution in title ing, a revolution which would reverse!, growth of the stdte and cause our socle„'f to work on the assumption that the role government in our affairs should he eoe tremely limited. For, however much A'a grouch about government, we expect it to,"co most things for us. The proposition wh,,101 dominates politics today is the one states that where there is difficulty or crl'ol government must intervene, rather thtle , leaving the matter to the individual,. tvc family, the community. Thus we see idlcej social engineering—of the kind represent/ by the Equal Opportunities Commissioltni, which excites little more than resentnicedie! And thus we see the growing triumph °I species over the individual. How the rev 11 tion—or, more correctly, the counter-re ; lution—might begin I will discuss next wee
Previous page
