Political commentary
The waiting is the worst part
Ferdinand Mount
Whenever you hear Labour MPs quoting from the New Testament or the works of R. H. Tawney, you can be sure that they have stopped thinking and switched on the automatic Sky Pilot. This sort of religiose moralising is the occupational vice of British socialists. They've only been out of work five minutes and already half the Labour front bench is back on the fine old Tawney. The history of the British Labour Party is supposed to have more to do with Methodism than with Marxism; but what it has more to do with than either is the ancient English pastime of ticking people off.
I don't know which is riper: Mr Callaghan, who has squirreled away more high government offices and good Sussex farmland than most of us have had luncheon vouchers, denouncing the 'what's-in-itfor-me society'; or Mr Benn claiming that Mrs Thatcher's message is the kind of stuff that 'ultimately drove Christ out of the temple when he tried to drive out the money-changers' — a little-known biblical episode only, I think, to be found in the Gospel according to St Tony, a corrupt and possibly apocryphal text.
But perhaps the ripest of all was to hear Mr Roy Hattersley quoting a characteristically fuzzy dictum of Tawney's on 'the tyranny of private wealth and private power'. Mrs Thatcher, according to Hatters, proposes `to favour the haves at the expense of the have-nots'. There is something gloriously preposterous in this assumption of austere morality. For Mr Hattersley is so pre-eminently one of nature's haves. His tubby, nattily suited figure might have been custom-built for a government Rover. The only original political sentiment I have heard him voice was that the working classes were entitled to 'real mayonnaise.' There is a lot to be said for this anti-Heinz, hedonistic variety of socialism; Anthony Crosland would certainly have approved, though the saintly Tawney sounds more like a cold-beetrootand-no-salad-cream-thank-you type.
But the flaw even in this real-mayonnaise socialism is that there never seems to be much scope for those members of the working class whose main pleasure in life is making something of it. Social democracy, while agreeing on the theoretical importance of personal liberty and independence, has never thought or done much about them.
Indeed, at the first sign of the workers becoming uppity, they have Tawney poured all over them. Poor, brave, much missed Shirley Williams touched with terrible acuteness upon the underlying reason for Labour's defeat — and hers — when asked why the new towns have swung against her in Hertford and Stevenage: 'people who come out from London to the new towns stick to their Labour inheritance, but their children growing up tend to look more to their own position than to the good of the country and that's the tragic thing about this election.'
For the heiress of the Webbs and the Laskis, the tragedy is that working people should no longer wish to have things done to them, to be pushed from old town to new town because that's where the jobs and the bathrooms are or to be told which school their children are to go to, and that with unprecedented cheek they should wish to assert some modest degree of choice over their lives. After all, if there are too many haves, there won't be enough have-nots to go round, at least not enough to vote in a Labour government.
One or two Labour moderates like Merlyn Rees and Giles Radice have been thinking aloud about the reasons for Labour's defeat and are prepared to admit that a great number of working-class people voted Conservative for genuinely conservative reasons. But most Labour leaders are reluctant to admit this disagreeable possibility. As a result, there is a growing gap between Labour rhetoric and political reality. These sermons are a convenient substitute for constructive thought while Labour sits back and waits for the allegedly inevitable collapse of the Conservative government.
Mr Callaghan is said to believe that Mrs Thatcher is surrounded by a pretty 'supine' crew: only Lord Carrington, he thinks, will be left to his own devices. She will try to run everything, interfere everywhere and eventually auto-destruct. Tony Benn paid a remarkable tribute to Mrs Thatcher's 'passion and commitment.' Suddenly they are all over her. And to think we used to be told what a dim little suburban woman she was. These personal tributes are tactically necessary to prove that she is bound to Go Too Far, but there does also seem to be in them a note of reluctant admiration, a hankering for that old-time religion which Labour so signally failed to generate during the election campaign.
These mixed feelings do reflect at least a half-awareness that Labour has lost the initiative as well as the election; the atmosphere in 1979 is different from 1970. Those Conservatives — and there are plenty — who believe that the opposition will somehow not allow the Tory government to carry through its measures have, I think, missed the weary, defensive tone of Labour's counter-attack so far. In 1970, Labour felt that it had been robbed, that the defeat was an accident or 'all Harold's fault' ; it could mobilise against Mr Heath's quiet revolution full-bloodedly and without misgiving. But after last winter, can Labour really muster much popular indignation against a modest measure of trade union reform? And now that the vast majority pay income tax, it is difficult to depict a swathe of tax cuts as a rich man's Budget.
What matters most and will continue to matter most for at least the first year or so of this government is not the Labour OppOS1tion but the Conservative Opposition, not the Enemy Without but the Enemy Within. Did Ted put up Charlie Morrison to stand against Edward du Cann for the chairmanship of the 1922? Why did Margaret humiliate Ted by offering him Washington and NATO when he had already said he wanted to stay at Westminster? What are we to make of the devilish plan to absorb the Heathite Conservative Research Department within the Thatcherite Conservative Central Office?
There are different but rather more interesting questions to be asked about these events, such as why the Research Department has done so little thought' provoking work in recent years and why du Cann was not asked to stand down When I was a lad, a politician who was entangled in such embarrassing financial shemozzles, whether by his own fault or not' could usually expect a quiet visit from some backbench heavy, like Mr Morn' son's father, now Lord Margadale, Whc), would say, 'Look. Edward, for the sake 0', the party, we think it might be better if • • • But perhaps I am inventing a golden Past' There is no doubt, though, that the moderates are alive and flapping. They await with anxiety the precise contents and cutting power of Mrs Thatcher's toolshed: the Soames Axe on the Civil Service, the Howe Scythe on income tax, the Joseph Chant" saw on industrial subsidies. The waiting 's the worst of it. It is a curious, jittery little interval. The Heathites bicker and count their slights. Labour MPs intone their bibll' cal prophecies. And the rest of us hoPet against hope that she will manage to ge some seedlings planted out before tlic weather breaks. Already some Tories are wondering whether Sir Geoffrey was right in his other' wise successful debut as Chancellor to make quite so much fuss about the dismal nature of his inheritance. The aim was to damPen expectations of his Budget which might then come as a pleasant surprise. But that kind of complaint can rebound. And was It wise to stress the need to reduce government borrowing this year? Tax cuts worth less than £3 billion canntlit be expected to shift attitudes much. Au, how can the Tories finance that scale 0' reduction in their first year — before al comparable reductions in govern'en spending have had time to take effect without extra borrowing? All you can sec, for sure is that if the Great Turn-Rot°, doesn't start now, it will never start at al''
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