POLITICS

If Lloyd George could do it, why can't they?

FERDINAND MOUNT

Mildness is all. The British public is now believed, by almost everyone in poli- tics, to have an insatiable appetite for mod- eration. Even jaded old journalists are drawn into the conspiracy of blandness and claim to be enjoying it, like people who say they never felt better since they gave up alcohol and red meat. As party conference succeeds party conference, there develops a kind of mutual admiration society be- tween politician and pundit: 'I say, you were quite extraordinarily moderate this morning.' Oh really, you liked it? Well, I did think your piece yesterday was awfully balanced, very refreshing.'

The orthodoxy is stifling and all- embracing. The ups and downs of the opin- ion polls, the success of this or that policy — all are assessed in terms of their Effec- tive Mildness Index. When asked the other day about prospects for the Labour Party Conference, David Owen and David Steel said with one voice that, the more vocifer- ous and contentious and extreme it was, the better for the Alliance. The old theory once confined to the Conservatives — that a party conference is not a place to have an argument at — is now the accepted wisdom.

In fact, it is thought better to avoid too much intense discussion of any thorny issue. Unemployment, for example, is best treated by a mixture of benevolent gener- alities and comfy little schemes for work- shops and things of that sort. There are said to be few votes in launching ambitious and dramatic plans to reduce it by a million or two; the right tactic is to deplore the 'callous extremism' of the Thatcher Gov- ernment.

In fact, the only issues where a party's policies might positively win votes — in- stead of potentially losing them — are now thought to be issues like animal welfare and the protection of the countryside. What a party requires for success is not so much Jeffrey Archer as James Herriot. Be- hind such calculations, there seems to lie a more or less conscious belief that many people yearn to turn away from the grim and intractable problems of the day and prefer to dwell upon a sentimental vision of Englishness, and that, whatever we may say about ourselves as a nation, we are in practice quite ready to accommodate ourselves to national decline, so long as it can be gracefully managed.

Even Ernest Hemingway might think that British politics had become a little over-obsessed by the theme of 'grace under pressure' and, in particular, by Mrs Thatcher's lack of it. A sort of excited shudder ran round the hall at the Liberal Party Conference when one speaker de- nounced her 'moaning minnies' outburst. There was the enemy made visible: not Poverty, Ignorance or Despair, but Insen- sitivity. The Alliance Pilgrim progresses through the Slough of Wasted Votes, shuns Vulgarity Fair, before reaching the Valley of Gentility en route to the Celestial City of Proportional Representation.

Now this view of politics — and of the mood of the country — is clearly based on something . There is a revulsion against the instability and to-and-froing of a two-party system in which the two parties have less and less in common — and against the rudeness and bad manners which result from that centrifugal drift. But are good manners enough?

There is surely more to the disillusion of the last ten years than a revolt against bad manners; there is also the resentment of Britain's relative decline, and the fear of upheavals caused by the decline of old in- dustries, and by a dozen other new arrivals on the scene, from immigration to reliable contraception. Good manners alone do not offer a remedy for all of these. Even the Labour Party may not be an entirely reli- able ogre for the Alliance. If Mr Kinnock fails to convince that he can roar as gently as any sucking dove, if the Labour Party turns nasty again, some voters may be tempted to keep a hold of nurse, even if she is a bit of an old scold. It is not clear that the more serious and alarming the out- look under a Labour government, the more readily they will turn to the Alliance.

In any case, winning power — or a share of it — is a rougher and more demanding game than scoring a high protest vote. What sticks out several miles is that almost every party which has won power in the last 50 years has done so with a programme that was positive and energetic, and appeared strikingly different from the sta- tus quo: Labour in 1945 obviously, Chur- chill in 1951 ('set the people free'), Wilson in 1964 ('the white heat of technology'), Heath in 1970 ('the quiet revolution'), and Mrs Thatcher in 1979. The one exception was Harold Wilson slipping through on the rails in the snap election of February 1974, a victory by default at best. It seems to me unlikely that the next general election will be another February 1974. On the con- trary, it can scarcely help being a full- blown, wound-up, all-out, decisive 15- rounder, in which energy and determina- tion will be, if anything, rather more im- portant than courtesy and moderation.

The last time the Liberals properly held the balance of power, in 1929, they won 59 seats and a quarter of the votes; and Lloyd George's sixpenny booklet We Can Con- quer Unemployment was held to have had a

lot to do with it. The pledge Lloyd George gave was simple and dramatic: 'The work put in hand will reduce the terrible figures of the workless in the course of a single year to normal proportions. . . . These plans

will not add one penny to national or local taxation.' More dramatic still, in the bril- liance of its language and the vigour of its arguments, was the supporting pamphlet by Keynes and Hubert Henderson, Can Lloyd George Do It? How marvelously they mocked Baldwin:

Safety First! The policy of maintaining a mil- lion unemployed has now been pursued for eight years without disaster. Why risk a change? We will not promise more than we can perform. We, therefore, promise no- thing.

The economies may have been suspect, but the pamphlet was terrific. And it sent the Baldwin government into a flat spin,

panicking them into rushing out a White Paper to rubbish Lloyd George's proposals — then, as now, a complete abuse of gov- ernment facilities which was condemned by everyone from the Times to Ramsay Mac- Donald.

In Dundee last week, by contrast, the Liberals passed one of those grey resolu- tions on the economy, full of mushy words like 'partnership' and 'decentralisation'. One of the few speakers with any spark in him was Tony Greaves, the rufous gremlin of the Liberal councillors, who urged the party to adopt its 1929 slogan and who claimed that 'the real moaning minnies in our society are those who say that unem- ployment is permanent and that it is neces- sary to redefine the concepts of employ- ment and leisure'. Exactly. People who go about redefining concepts tend to have a distaste for actually doing anything.

But Mr Greaves is the sort of chap whom party managers are anxious to keep off the platform these days. He has a red beard,

he looks funny and wears funny clothes, he gets excited. Indeed, I once saw him fall off a platform at a Liberal Assembly. All the

same, he is right. The Alliance sandwich is still short of beef, and this matters. I con- tinue to doubt whether manners makyth majority.