Why we hate the Conservative party
PERSONAL COLUMN BERON WAUGH
Who are We? All thinking people, of course. Most responsible commentators. The great mass of the intelligentsia. Every Labour voter and a very large proportion of Conservative voters. Under whatever bogus sociological label we hide ourselves, we are everything that is bright and young and pleasant and right-minded in contemporary England. We are also an imper- sonal pronoun with gerundival qualities such as can be found in the great papal anathemas of the past. We include, it is true, nearly every inhabitant of the British Isles who is not a paid-up member of the Conservative party, but we also include God and such abstract notions as right, reason, justice and truth. Or so I maintain.
Since socialist hatred is easy to understand, and fatuous to appease, I shall concentrate on the attitude of unsocialists. Conservative apologists will argue that it is an over- simplification to divide people into socialists and unsocialists. Most of us flounder in the mudflats between, believing that the Govern- ment should plan a bit of growth for us while protecting the pound and educate the lower orders in contraception while mysteri- ously drawing the line at steel nationalisa- tion. And it is the middle ground that pulls in the votes, as both parties recognise. Yet the fact remains that the Labour party, at any rate in opposition, had innumerable friends among socialists; while the Conservative party has practically none among unsocialists.
Which is not to say that the Conservative party should move to the right, in order to endear itself to unsocialist intellectuals. Its record of thirteen years' comparative inactivity is fairly respectable, and each election pre- scribes its own list of unfulfillable promises; all that is required for the triumph of un- socialism is that governments should do nothing. But if it is to have the committed support and loyalty of anyone outside itself, it must try to make a virtue out of being unsocialist. One begins to suspect that true Con- servative principles are best shown by the occa- sional sly wink, indicating that to those in the know (despite various cunning subterfuges) the real Conservative party is uniquely dedicated to the survival of `us'—the render classes and landed gentry.
Which might explain why those of us who do not happen to belong to that happy band can find no spiritual home in the Conserva- tive party, and also why the Conservative party is suspicious of intellectuals. Even among mercantile Conservatives, who see the party as their best available protection against the vin- dictive depredations of socialism, there is no liking for theorists. Intellectuals are either `pink' and rightly suspect, or they seem to be arguing that improvident old-age pensioners should starve, which is no way of winning votes. Conservatives do not realise, as the Labour party does, that philosophies and prin- ciples, when translated into action in a democracy, become matters of tendency rather than absolutes. Marx invented the slogan: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs' (jeder nach seinen Fahikkeiten, fedem nach seinen Bediirfnissen). This sentiment has been an enormous comfort to socialists in the long winter evenings, pro- viding a focus for their loyalties and aspira- tions as well as striking terror into the ranks of unsocialism. Of course any government which tried to put it into practice would scarcely receive a single vote. Just try con- vincing a steel-presser in Swindon what his needs are, or even persuading a boiler-maker on the Clyde to give according to his abilities.
But where are the hopeless, idealistic slogans of Toryism? 'Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set'? Even before the winds of change, that was a wry one. 'A property- owning democracy'? That is what we already have, not some wild dream for the future. `You've never had it so good.' Haven't we, just? My great-grandfather, a country doctor of ordinary abilities and no private income, so far as I know, kept a coachman and three housemaids; he rented a shoot, educated his sons at public school and entertained his friends to dinners at which three meat courses appeared and champagne was served from jugs.
`Down with the community, up with the indi- vidual' might strike a few chords; or even more emotively: 'Out of the ant-heap and into the jungle.' But the truest expression of democratic unsocialism, 'I'm all right, Jack' has been held self-evidently immoral, which demonstrates the extent to which socialist morality has overtaken politics.
Objectors to socialism divide almost equally, in my experience, into those who are most affronted by its stupidity, those who are most affronted by its injustice and those who are most alarmed by its endless vistas of boredom. Conservatives entirely ignore the last group, implicitly deny the second and only appease the first on specific points, never drawing atten- tion to the philosophical absurdities from which they derive. Socialists befriend and even try to appease their intellectuals, but who in the Conservative party has made a step towards recognising the in- fluence of Peter Simple, Warden Sparrow, Colin Welch and the countless unsocialists to be found lonely and disconsolate in the uni- versities, in the law, medicine, journalism, the arts, and even, I dare say, in television? Where is the ferment of unsocialist thought, with dialectical arguments continuing far into the night? Certainly not within earshot of more than a couple of Tory mPs. As it is, socialism has somehow acquired the monopoly of virtue, and whenever the Conservative party tries to woo its electorate, it points to the socialist initiatives it has taken--commendably few and commendably half-hearted though they be—instead of stressing the many socialist errors it has avoided and the libertarian initiatives still to come.
The basic mistake, which I think derives from the structure of the Conservative party, is to suppose that the working class is socialist to a man, in that it prefers social security to the greater material benefits of self-help. No doubt this is true of about half, but it does not begin to explain the conservative working-class vote which is consciously and deliberately un- socialist. Only the pinkest of the pink can Believe that these voters hope to see socialism more efficiently and humanely introduced by a - Conservative government, 'while only a blinkered idiot can shrug it off as the natural obsequiousness of the British working man to his social superiors. It is impossible to deny that the lure of idleness is every bit as much a dynamic force in political cajolery as the appeal to avarice, but a substantial sector of the English working class has testified regularly at every election that it is more avaricious than it is idle. If the appeal of Labour to the work- ing class is recognised as being directed towards a reluctance in the individual to stand on his own feet, combined with a lingering resentment of those able and willing to do so, then the appeal of Conservatism must be seen as directed towards a readiness for self-help com- bined with a certain indifference towards the plight of those who are less confident of their abilities. But the Conservative party makes no such appeal, and every Conservative voter must discover it, in guilty secrecy, for himself.
Of course, the Conservative party is in no position to preach the moral--as well as the material—advantages of capitalism over social- ism if it does not believe in them itself.
Our greatest complaint is that there is no evidence of any such belief. Rather the reverse, in fact. Socialism may be very dandy and pi, say our Conservative pragmatists, but it doesn't happen to work. Among true and pure intel- lectuals, nobody has ever supposed that it would. Yet a large part of socialism's dynamic comes from these people, who hate made a moral, not a positivist, choice. Through its dis- trust of unsocialist intellectuals, the Conserva- tive party has no moral dynamic of its own.
Electorally, this may not matter much, but it explains why we hate the party, and I can't believe, as the .Central Office appears to be- lieve, that anti-dogmatism carried to the point of a dogma is much of an electoral advan- tage either. Our hatred is seldom as explicit as I may have seemed to suggest, and usually appears as a general dislike of Conservative politicians. This is unfair, of course. It would be most unreasonable to expect an English Conservative leader to possess the honest charm of Barry Goldwater—we are a much smaller country, after all—and it would almost certainly be disastrous if he did. But I am sure that if unsocialist academics and free-lance thinkers were given a little more encouragement, our Conservative Members of Parliament would not be—as they now are with terrifyingly few exceptions—such a crowd of punks.
To an unsocialist, socialism is as immoral as it is fatuous. Suez revealed the extent to which the Conservative party has given up the idea of an unsocialist morality. We thought that our gallant, hopeless attempt to retrieve the Suez Canal was an act of the purest, Biblical justice. The Egyptian government had taken something which did not belong to it, so the rightful owners were going to get it back again. How did the Conservative party present its case? We were acting in the spirit, if not the letter, of the United Nations Charter (the New Testament?) to restore peace to a troubled area.
What thinking person could ever support the Conservative party again, after such misguided hypocrisy? Who were they trying to convince? Even now, it is not too late to make amends. The Government threatens an inquest on Israeli collusion over Suez. Let Mr Heath welcome it, drop the liars of the time in the mud to which they rightly belong, and point to Suez as the one positively moral action the Conservative government took in thirteen years. Unbelievably, the electorate might begin to warm to him. First, of course, the Conservative party must convince itself that it is right.
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