Westminster Commentary
Or all the intellectual discus- sions ever captured in cold print, my favourite is that in the opening chapter of The Longest Journey. The students are sitting round in Mr. Forster's beloved. Cambridge, talking gravely of the reality of matter. Anse11 is a whole-hog subjectivist; for him, nothing exists outside the mind of the beholder, and he argues his case from the cow in the meadow, the matches with which he lights his Pipe and anything else that will serve as an illustration. Then the door opens, and in rushes Agnes to reproach Rickie with his forgotten Promise to meet her at the station. The other students, subjectivism forgotten, make excuses and slip from the room, but not Anse11. Rising to heights of comic grandeur, he puts his Philosophy to the proof. Agnes is a subjective Phenomenon of Rickie's brain; right, she shall be treated as such. And he behaves as if she is literally not there, putting the sensitive Rickie to terrible shame. What is more, when he is rebuked afterwards for his bad manners, he keeps it up; there was no woman there, therefore he could not have been rude to her.
Perhaps I press analogy too hard (to tell you the truth, I only wanted another excuse to talk about Mr. Forster), but it seems to me that there is a political parallel for this situation before us today. For do not the manager-men of the Conservative and Labour Parties tend to behave dike Ansel! in that darkened Cambridge room, and pretend, that nothing happened when the door was flung open and Mr. Grimond rushed in to rebuke them for not meeting him at the station? From Comrade Hailsham right down to Doctor Hill on the one side, and from Morgan Phillips right up to Mr. Harold Wilsonon the other, there is an all-too-tacit assumption that the Liberal Party isn't there, and that if they only stare hard enough at the spot emu which it claims to be standing it will oblige them by disappearing. nounlY it won't. Not yet awhile, at any rate, and before setting one or two heartily objective cats among the pigeons in Smith Square. You ask Al r' David Hardman, if you can find him, Whether the Liberal Party exists or not, and I advise you to duck as you do so. For Mr. Hard- ran used to sit in the Labour interest for Dar- ,ngton, and had a great political career before him, until a Liberal raised his banner there, snaffled half the formerly Labour vote and let the Tory, as they say, in. Or put the same ques- tion to Councillor Parkinson, who was all set to inherit the Conservative seat at Rochdale until Mr. Ludovic Kennedy got there; as he surveys the sitting Labour Member from his position at the bottom of the poll he must feel rather more like the faith-healer of Deal than Bishop Berkeley.
For the polls may say what they will; an 8 per cent. Liberal vote distributed evenly about the country would have no appreciable effect on the general election, but (1 will get this into Mr. David Butler's head if I have to clear the way with a pick-axe) an 8 per cent. Liberal vote is not going to be distributed evenly about the country. There are Tory MPs walking about today who are going to be defeated at the general election even if there is a Tory landslide. Well distributed, the Liberal vote could nullify the effect of an average Conservative lead as large as 2 or even 3 per cent. Nor is this one of those fanciful hypotheses (like the election being won by a majority of one vote in each constituency but a consequent sweep of every seat in the House); for of the 200 and upward.Liberal candi- dates so far adopted, three-quarters are standing in Conservative-held seats, and many of these are crucially marginal ones. Labour and Con- servative parties alike may huff and puff about 'splitting the vote,' but it is the 'Conservative' vote (the Conservatives offend many people by talking as if it was theirs by some prescriptive right, just as they talk of the 'Independent Liberal Party' to emphasise the fragmentary nature of their rivals, but in fact succeed only in underlining their independence from the 'dead flies' bred from the putrescent corpse of the Woolton-Teviot agreement) that is going to be split three times as often as the 'Labour' vote.
All of which is more, relevant to the problem of deciding whether to vote Liberal than one may suppose. For when we come to weigh up the things the Liberal Party offers, as I have been doing these past two weeks with the policies and records presented by their two opponents. it is essential to recognise that the whole basis of our consideration has shifted. We may vote for a Labour Government or a Conservative Government according to which of those pros- pects entices us the more, or revolts us the less. But we cannot vote -for a Liberal Government, for there isn't going to be a Liberal Government after the election, no matter how the country votes. We may vote Labour because we believe in more nationalisation, and we may vote Con- servative if we think the Government's Central African policy is a wise one, and the best of British luck to us in either case. But we cannot vote Liberal because we believe in Free Trade (assuming, that is, that the Liberal Party does believe in Free Trade, and yOur guess is as good as mine and a lot better than that of some Liberals I know), because although such an action may have a great effect on the election result, it will have none on Free Trade. In a few constituencies (with the best will in the world I cannot make it more than fourteen at most, including the six they hold at present) voting Liberal may put a Liberal MP into the House. But even for those who live in these places, and still more for the rest of us, voting Liberal can be no more than a gesture.
The question is, should we make this gesture? And what sort of a gesture would it be, anyway? To begin with, of course, if enough of us make it, it will be a gesture in the direction of Mr. Macmillan and Mr. Gaitskell, roughly akin to that produced by extending the right hand fan- wise directly in front of the face with the palm at right-angles to the plane of the forehead and the little finger farthest from the face. There are few things more politically important at the moment than that there should be some kind of rebuff administered to the two major party machines. Short of electing Liberal MPs in droves, that rebuff can best be administered by the rolling-up of a really substantial Liberal popular vote.
The Liberals last time polled 722,000 votes in 110 constituencies. This time they will have roughly twice as many candidates: If they poll a million and a half, therefore, they will have done no more than mark time, and although in many constituencies they will wreak dreadful havoc on pollster and psephologist they will not have that salutary effect that is so necessary. I believe a total Liberal vote of over two million is possible; its effect would be incalculable. Apart from the fact that it would make wonder- ful nonsense of the entire election (by upsetting so many apparently certain results), it would be a short, sharp shock to both the Conservative and Labour Parties of a kind that we desperately need them to have. What is more, there is every chance that the effect of such a shock would be even greater than it might appear at first; for I believe that the slight decline in the total vote that took place in 1955 is going to be repeated, and indeed much accentuated, this time. Two million out of twenty-six would be something; two million out of a total nearer twenty would be a lot more. (It would wreck so many more individual results, apart from anything else.) There would still be either a Labour or a Con- servative Government; but it would govern in the knowledge that if the Liberals could only capitalise on their good fortune, they could use it as a springboard from which a really spectacu- lar leap could be made into the future. Eight Liberal MPs, and the things for which they stand, could be ignored in 1959. But forty in 1964 could smash the whole party structure of this country to smithereens. And high time too.
But are there only these 'negative' reasons for voting Liberal? (Though I must pause to point out that if laying the foundations for a move- ment which could smash up the party structure of this country, with all its innumerable evils, is a negative aim, I shall be proud to wear my minus in my cap.) I think there are others. For one thing, if Britain had a Presidential election on the lines of the United States, so that our choice was directly between Mr. Macmillan, Mr. Gaitskell and Mr. Grimond, I would be in- clined to say that anybody voting for either of Mr. Grimond'S opponents deserved the immedi- ate attention of two doctors and a magistrate. Compared to them, Mr. Grimond is almost miraculously free, frank, honest and upright. His development in the last two years or so has been astonishing; he has seemed to grow visibly before our eyes in political and moral stature.
For instance; the Devlin Report was published on July 24, a Thursday. Even before that, assiduous leaking had made it reasonably public knowledge that it would be 'rejected' by the Government and that there would be no resig- nations over it. The only man publicly to deplore this before the debate on July 29 was Mr. Grimond. Where was Mr. Callaghan during the weekend preceding the debate? Where was Mr. Griffiths? Where was Mr. Bevan? Where was Mr. Gaitskell? They were working out the best party strategy to apply to the situation. Mr. Grimond got up and let fly.
Nor is this the only example of the way in which he has upheld sanity and decency when one lot were trampling it in the mud and the other lot weighing up the advantages of trying to rescue it. In the first debate on the Jordan- Lebanon landings, while Mr. Gaitskell was behaving with all the virility of a female imper- sonator, Mr. Grimond simply got up and blacked the Government's eye. It is said that Mr. Grimond can afford to speak out on behalf of what is right in a way that Mr. Macmillan and Mr. Gaitskell, bound by the chances of keeping or gaining or losing office, cannot. But have we not come to a very terrible pass indeed when people can dismiss as irresponsible a man who prefers the truth to lies and says so? (Yes, there are skeletons in Mr. Grimond's cupboard, too; one of them labelled 'Carmarthen.' But for almost two years such cupboards have been closed, while the Tory and Labour leaders seem determined to fling theirs wide to the view and, indeed, publicly boast about the contents. If Mr. Gaitskell, after the recall conference of the General and Municipal Workers, can feel superior to Mr. Macmillan, after the Devlin debate, then Mr. Gaitskell is morally boss-eyed. And vice versa.) But there is another, and unfortunately less tangible, reason for voting Liberal. I say 'unfor- tunately' because this seems to me the most important, as the most positive, of all the Liberal attractions. There is, it seems to me, a trend in this country today in the direction of authori- tarianism, which has gone hand in hand with an increase in violence. The seeds were there before Suez, but it was then that the plant began to flower. It is largely, no doubt, due to Britain's steep decline as a world power, which, though it dates back to 1942 at least, was more starkly shown up in 1956 than at any earlier moment. We all know the kind of national neurosis that grips a country when it ceases to count in world affairs, and if we don't know then we should take a trip to France or, better still, Algeria. Just such a national neurosis seems to me to be grip- ping this country today, and getting worse.
it has been fostered, to some extent deliber- ately, by the present Government, but it is by no means an exclusively Tory phenomenon. Indeed, it is not really a party-political phenomenon at all, and by definition could hardly be. The outward and visible signs of this authoritarianism range from Suez and Hola through the Nottingham Watch Committee to the beating-up of hecklers and the slapping of Lord Altrincham's face, and I do not like it, A vote for the Liberal Party, though as far as 1 know they do not make an attack on this trend part of their day-to-day argument, would be a vote against it. For one of the things that has encouraged this trend is the increasing rigidity of the two-party division of the country, with its hardening of the nation's moral arteries. There really is something seriously wrong with a country in which Mr. Selwyn Lloyd can remain Foreign Secretary with his record, and Mr. Harold Wilson can be prospective Chancellor of the Exchequer with his. A vote for a Liberal will not, as I said at the beginning of this argumen mean that Colonel Lort-Phillips will beco Foreign Secretary and Sir Andrew MacFadye'• Chancellor of the Exchequer. -But it will mea if it is multiplied sufficiently by like-thinki voters, that a brake; will have been put on th most sinister and distressing tendency in Briti life today. The force of that brake-power, an the value of applying it, must wait upon a weig ing of the party cons against the party pros th I have been outlining these three weeks. Patien
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