Toryism and democracy
JOHN VINCENT The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill Robert Blake (Eyre and Spottis- woode 60s) There is one aspect to the Conservative party on which fresh thought is hardly needed. That is the vision of it as an endless parade of little men seeking community in procession from lobby to bar, from bar to bank, from bank to hustings: a cheap way into the golf club, into the Carlton, into business: a lifetime at a minor public school, an Elysium of Brideshead plus beer, as its ethereal higher self : as its lowest, an earn- est teacher of night school economics to the nation, corrupting the public reason of the English with a wooden bursarial seriousness. With this, its tribal and private side, Mr Blake is the man to deal, and his Ford Lec- tures abound in illuminating condensations of the tribal chronicle. His insights out- number his pages: one cannot ask for more. All the better, too, that he writes about the Tories rather as Kenyatta wrote about the Kikuyu—half accepting, half protesting, the views of white civilisation. In cases of dif- ficulty, as befits a true interpreter of Tory tradition from Peel to Heath, Mr Blake takes a slightly anti-Tory line, ministering to the contentment of all his readers rather than the partisanship of some. The tone is that of a skilled chairman guiding routine business through a university committee, aware that his only mandate is to get the meeting over in time for tea, and knowing that the mark of his skill is to make his audience unconscious of it.
Very few people can both tell a lively story and communicate a warming and decent centrality as well as Mr Blake. This applies to both sides of his story. One side of the Tory story—the inner life of a male institution in which everyone knows. every- one—is in the end sinriply a story, history imitating Trollope, endlessly and forever, so long as male institutions exist in hierarchical societies: and one can stand only so much of that sort of thing without also becoming it. The real story implicit in Mr Blake's Pages is the external function of political Parties—how they enable fifty millions to live a settled life without really quarrelling.
Many of us want a hierarchical society, because we cannot envisage anything else, and because we are already in the hierarchy. Hierarchy, however, does not just happen: it has to be maintained. If the Conservative party serves this end, then nearly all its consequence lies in that function alone: and if it no longer serves such an end, it joins the ranks of all other veterans' clubs, lov- able perhaps, a focus for tradition and sen- timent no doubt, but whatever the vitality of its inner conversation, just not mattering.
We do not know what maintains a hier- archical society: nor do we want a Bagehot to pull a paper solution from his pocket, unrelated to real experience of life. But the answer must be a. historical one, and must be hidden from those who have not fol- lowed the problem of social order from the Victorian period with which Mr Blake be- gins his study. We have a working hier- archical society now, because of custom, because we are used to it, because (under very different historical conditions) we were given such a system in the nineteenth cen- tury. Victorian society imprinted sufficient regard for property, for education, for the parliamentary world, to allow the experi- ment in flattery called democracy to be operated without disturbance and not wholly in bad faith. But what history has given. history can take away. We have, sleepily, been living under the illusion that because the problem of who (if anyone) can rule was solved rather a long time ago in the context of a still largely traditional Vic- torian society, it has therefore been solved for our time. Rather, the problem of who can rule is as wide open as could be.
The most conservative solution, perhaps, would be revolution. Revolution is the Ark, not the flood: it preserves some hierarchy, some rationality, some social order. Not to your taste, you say: but then do you feel even a modest confidence that some assem- blage of parliamentarians, professors, and businessmen will achieve a significant and permanent public authority? By revolution is meant the effective reconstitution of authority: and the opposite to revolution is not social order, but a mess. Electoral democracy under Victorian conditions was all very well, because the state and the electorate wanted substantially the same things, and party politics was a useful device for bringing more power to the state's elbow. It is, however, patent that the things the central government now wants (its strongest consciousness being of operating rational economic procedures under conditions of in- ternational competition) are nothing to do with what the electorate wants. Given elec- toral democracy and a free labour market, weak and trivial intentions on the part of the electorate are given a quite unreal his. torical force. The democracy has the power to create a mess, and no more: the central government has the power to frustrate the democracy, and no more. Neither is free to be what it could be. And there is no external enemy.
Social discipline is created by hardships within and threats without. If there are no threats from without, fictional enemies will serve: the Devil in colonial Massachusetts, the balance of payments in the 1960s. Now there are no more devils. The loss of great power status and the loss of social discipline are two sides of the same coin: and though the curse of Adam is still with us, it is not crushing enough to keep people quiet, even if it is still crushing enough to make them noisy.
Tory philosophy is a dikussion of the length of chain needed to tether the slave to the oar. Sometimes the chain is called paternalism, sometimes the free market, sometimes constitutionalism, or even (a by- product of wartime propaganda) democracy. It is however only the length of the chain that has been in question: Tory wisdom consists in saying the chain should be the right length. What the debate does not in- clude. but ought to include, is whether there can necessarily be a chain at all. The Con- servative mind is unprepared for a situation where you cannot tell people what to do. To it such a notion recalls anarchism, an absurdity of pamphlets and beards. Beards and pamphlets, however, are a red herring, the point being that once it is understood that there are plenty of middle-class situa- tions where you cannot tell people what to do, then everyone will want to have what the middle class has and likes. Laziness and creeping privilege make Kropotkins of us all.
'For where is Bohun? where is Mow- bray? where's Mortimer? nay. which is more, and most of all, where is Plantagenet?' And may we not also have to say. Where is Property, where is Education, where is the parliamentary community itself, considered as means of controlling a hierarchical society? A Conservative party which rides popular emotions will finish by not having the functions of a Conservative party, namely, controlling and subduing popular emotion, and in politics it is functions not names that count. A Conservative party which overrides popular emotions is in turn no less of a threat to hierarchy and order. Those who want orderliness and a quiet and stable existence, must come to accept that the difficulties involved in having (and ever re-creating) hierarchies which can tell people what to do, are becoming unusually great: while those who want hierarchy and social discipline must realise that they cannot have a reasonably peaceful society as well. Order- liness and orderedness are no longer the same, but at least the problems now are no darker than when Tory politicians made their first essays into regulating the moral ideas of an industrial nation, the grand and uniting theme of Mr Blake's book.
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