EEC(1)
Mr Wilson's new clothes
STUDENT OF POLITICS
The press is trying to persuade us to see Mr Wilson as a shrunken and negligible figure who has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since his last spell in opposition. This view is not only wrong, but will also be a dangerous one should Tory MPs come to accept it. For Mr Wilson has learned something, and he has learned it from Mr Powell. By this we do not mean that he will make curious speeches full of high language and low anecdote. What he has learned from Mr Powell since 1964 is that it can be safer and more important to go against informed opinion than to go with it.
Informed opinion (as in the case of the current pro-EEC bandwagon) has all the fickleness of a woman with none of her propensity to deep attachment. To be specific, Mr Wilson in 1963-66 set his cap at informed opinion and did very well, for a Labour leader, in winning its support. He then saw the support melt away into the mist as things became difficult, leaving him stranded without the firm populist support that he had sacrificed to get what might be called the Astor vote. It is unlikely that Mr Wilson sets any high priority on getting back the support of the media. It is highly likely that he relishes the sight of an unsuspecting Tory party repeating his mistakes of 1964. Mr Heath's supranational EEC is really the same kind of thing as Mr Wilson's unlamented whitehot technological revolution. Both gambits were responses to the interests of the media, international business and high finance, in innovation, or rather in creating an atmosphere of innovation. From a party view, both were errors, not only because they simply neglected the various real communities making up the nation, but because while one can all too readily commit one's party to the media and the metropolitan elite, one cannot commit them to one's party.
The pro-EEC consensus among businessmen and leaders of opinion, far from daunting Mr Wilson, forms part of the cobweb of destruction he is weaving round the Tory party. Mr Wilson's reticence on the EEC is not a matter of making sure of Labour unity. The Labour party at large is, without doubt, more aggressively and positively united on the EEC than on any other matter within sight. Mr Wilson's aim in delaying matters is to make sure that the Tory party are enticed into going beyond the common prudence engendered by party controversy. Mr Heath's sense that everything is going his way is in fact Mr Wilson's way of giving him enough rope to hang himself. Over the next three months, the object of the Labour leaders is to establish firmly in the public mind that the Tory party are offering them pie in the sky over the EEC. When the pie does not materialize (and at the very best nothing in particular will happen for some time after entry), public reaction, as always when anything is oversold, will be bitter disillusionment. On the other hand, Mr Wilson's role in the whole affair — undogmatic, questioning, slow-moving, unexcited — will look in retrospect like sane, moderate, prudent national leadership.
Unless, of course, the Tory rebels frustrate his schemes. There is no question of anti-EEC Tory MPs bringing down the Government, but there is a real question of them saving it from Mr Heath's excesses. If the anti-EEC tories insist on the Government trying to carry out, not Mr Heath's rather extreme policies for a supra-national European power, but something more like the general cabinet (and EEC Council of Ministers) view on the removal of trading barriers within Europe, without prejudice to Britain's world position, then they will do the Government the greatest of services. They will also cut the ground from under Mr Wilson's feet, and reduce him to his proper size. If the anti-EEC MPs, on the other hand, lose their nerve, then Mr Wilson will inherit that great political territory, discovered by Mr Powell, which rightly belongs to those who speak for those who distrust and feel disregarded by government. He will inherit, however, with advantages that Mr Powell might have envied: a party that has closed ranks behind him, after a final shove to eliminate the pro-EEC millionaires, mugwump intellectuals and Foreign Office spokesmen within the party: an economic situation of exceptional uncertainty: the absence of the need, which so hampered Mr Powell, to court publicly some unusual emphasis. And, if this were not enough, Mr Wilson will gain enormously with the quite different constituency of sensible men who want politicians to be primarily exponents of professional skills exercised upon very difficult problems, rather than banner-waving upholders of a great cause like Mr Heath. The longer Mr Wilson hangs on to an unemotional view that the EEC question is very difficult, the more he (and he alone among senior politicians known to the public) stands to gain when it becomes clear that it is indeed very difficult.
Mr Wilson is not trying to stop entry into the EEC. He is not tryng to bring the Government down this autumn. What Mr Wilson has set himself to do is to establish that the Tories collectively (and not just Mr Heath) have committed an act of exceptional misjudgement. If he can do that (and to do it, he needs to create a sense that Tory anti-Marketeers hardly exist), he will command the centre of politics. He will command it in the sense of popular emotion, and in the sense of being thought to know how to govern carefully. He will be Mr Maudling and Mr Powell rolled into one, as it were, and without some of their idiosyncrasies.
The economic arguments are now clear. The case for is a Great Perhaps, and cannot be filled out. The City has difficulty in defining a substantial number of beneficialities from entry, and the Investors' Chronicle gives prominence to a circular from Phillips and Drew arguing that losers will far exceed gainers. The ease against, as put by Kaldor, Shore and A Senior Conservative, is a prediction of catastrophe chiefly on balance of payments and price competitiveness grounds, and this argument can be faulted only because it does not fully consider the possibilities of a massive British devaluation or a socioeconomic crisis among the Six. As to predictions, of growth or catastrophe, we can now only wait and see, having noted that no case has been made for changing to a high cost economy.
The international arguments boil down to two questions. Do we seriously think it very important to go into the EEC if it means giving up our freedom of action and world position, and becoming exactly like Italy now is (which is, on what we have so far been told, precisely what entry does mean internationally, no less, no more)? Secondly, what kind of future Europe did Mr Heath really commit us to in his key talk with M. Pompidou, as the secret price of entry?
Finally, because effective parties are the precondition of effective achievements, there is the party question, which is about how the Tory party is to contain Mr Wilson's not insignificant power for destructiveness. In order to get its unpopular EEC programme through, not once, but night after night over the next two years, the Tories are already seeking support from new sources, and especially from the basically non-Tory information establishments. Winning support from the media for Tory policies is now, already, turning out to mean Tories carrying out media policies, and using media language. In identifying with advanced sectors of the economy and advanced economic pundits, however, the Tories are losing that identification with those for whom the language of progress and preaching, whether from Campbell Adamson or Cripps, has little appeal. Tory economic policy is melting into that of the Times. The party is beginning to sound as if it were a party of advanced progressive opinion, which means, as Mr Wilson found, that the varied moral constituencies that should make up a broad national party will suddenly cease to be there. Advanced progressive opinion, to which Mr Heath seems to be tying the party, has little to offer to the small shopkeeper, farmer or contractor, to the service pensioner, to professional people retired on carefully calculated budgets, to executives over forty-five with a job to lose, to housewives who prefer good food to bad, or to regions more than an hour from London, except contempt and a callous belief that such people are much to blame for being what they are. Tory backbenchers can feel perfectly free to vote on the EEC issue on its merits: but in doing so they should consider with open eyes what it is that Mr Wilson is• hoping they will do.
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