Political commentary
Making her ridiculous
Charles Moore
Acomprehensive schoolboy might prefer to be deliberately graceless. A public school boy would affect ease. Mr Kinnock looks like a grammar school boy. His suit is new, or newly pressed, and a deep respectable blue. His hair is short and carefully trained, and his manner is eager, deferential, conformist, anxious to show himself off, but anxious to please. He is determined to deliver his words with an air of spontaneity, but we know that, like the head prefect proposing his vote of thanks on speech day, he has learnt them off by heart and repeated them all last week in front of his mirror. And we feel, as he must, that the main thing is just to get through them without mishap, He does, and he makes a pleasant impression; but the Americans, who have just done a General Galtieri and invaded an island which owes allegiance to the Queen, have distracted the attention of Prime Minister's Questions, and the hour, after a statement from the Foreign Secretary, is Mr Denis Healey's.
Mr Kinnock's opening venture was on spending, with particular reference to the National Health Service, and he followed it up the next day by debating the question with Mr Norman Fowler, an oddly self- debasing way of establishing himself in his new role in the House of Commons. Still, it must be true that the NHS remains one of Labour's best bets. It is thought to have been Labour's idea (though really a Liberal thought of it first), and it is one of those few remaining sacred elements in British public affairs, the monarchy being a yet more potent example. People support the NHS in an unreasoning, sometimes an unreasonable, way. It is an object of piety, rather than one way of dealing with a social problem, to which the knee is bowed. And no one is more ostentatious in her genuflec- tions than the Prime Minister. During the election campaign, she did not merely insist that the Government was determined to guarantee a universal health service. She chose to prove the Government's commit- ment to the existing NHS, and to do so in the crude terms that, in other areas, she has been telling us all to discard — boasting of spending more money. The Government has agreed that the Health Service should budget for a rise in real terms of half a per cent per year for ten years. Mrs Thatcher has personally pledged that there will be no charges for visits to doctors or for hospital beds. She is terrified of accusations on the subject, and bewildered about what to do. She runs, so naturally the Opposition chases.
Poor Mr Fowler, who seldom gives much appearance of being master of his fate, cap- Lain of his soul, or anything in that depart- ment above the rank of cabin boy, has been made to pay for her mistakes. But at Blackpool, with new courage born of desperation, he did begin to hit back. He suggested that strikes do more actual damage to health care than does a Tory government; and he dared to point out that not every penny of the f151/2 billion devoted to the Health Service is spent with absolute regard to efficiency, economy, or the patient. This week, he made approving noises about the Griffiths Report which sug- gests appointing managers with real ex- ecutive powers to each main level of the Service. Another report — on NHS cost control — is coming soon. Contracting ser- vices out to private operators is being en- couraged. In the pitifully small space for manoeuvre left him by the Prime Minister, Mr Fowler is manoeuvring.
The natural reaction of Labour to all this is to say that the Tories are trying to destroy the Health Service. In his maiden speech in 1970, Mr Kinnock unveiled Mr Heath's secret plan for same, and both before and since Labour has kept that plan on its files and produced it extremely often. But it does have the drawback of being untrue. It will do fine as a last-minute election smear, but it has not got enough substance as an ac- cusation to last a parliament. Of course, the Tories are not going to dismantle the NHS. They are going to continue to run it badly. The question of health does not reveal the Government's ideological ruthlessness, but its muddle-headed in- competence.
Over the past four years, the Government has won most of the arguments that it has chosen to enter. It has won over inflation, and over defence. It has strengthened the notion that things run privately are general- ly run more efficiently. But it has not suc- ceeded in shifting the view that, in services involving 'care', government is the proper provider. It has got stuck on education, social services and health — in other words, on all its most expensive commitments apart from defence, which is why everyone is talking about 'drift', that deadly political disease which every doctor can recognise but few can cure. On all these questions, it has almost no idea of what to do. Worse, it does not dare have an idea in case everyone jumps on it.
Funnily enough, Labour is not very good at recognising this. Mrs Thatcher has no stauncher admirers than the hard Left, which calls constantly for a socialist leader `to defend our class with the vigour and skill with which she defends hers'. She says that she is a 'conviction politician', and that is the Left's only idea of what a politician ought to be. The more moderate Labour MPs are simply in awe, as politicians natural- ly are since they live by them, of the votes Mrs Thatcher has managed to pile up. Mr Foot's failings have magnified her abilities in their minds. And they attribute to her a mystical ability to keep her party behind her, which none of them shares. For years now, Labour has built up, successfully in its own ranks, unsuccessfully with most of the public, a picture of the Prime Minister as a prodigy of evil ruthlessness, a Hitler who has not yet invaded Russia; whereas the truth is altogether less terrible and more ridiculous.
It is ridiculous, not only because of the obvious failures but because the 'conviction politician' retains all her convictions, but just doesn't know what to do with them. In Monday's Guardian, Dr David Owen pointed out that the 'ideological stance of Thatcherism' was antipathetic to the NHS. She always has private treatment, just as she never travels on a train, and she would expect anyone else with any sense to do the same. Unfortunately, Dr Owen is still a leading theologian of the Health Service, and so he is not in a position to follow up his own attack. His article sidetracks in- to a scholastic discussion about why it was all right for Mrs Thatcher to have her varicose veins done privately, but wicked not to have NHS retina repair, and ends up with the usual call for more money. The point surely is that Mrs Thatcher is bad for the NHS, not because she hates it and is try- ing to get rid of it, but because she hates it and is trying to keep it, handing out cash to it with eyes averted as if it were a hideous beggar. If only Dr Owen could apostasise from his old faith, as he shows he has done over many economic questions in his article in the lEA's new, improved journal Economic Affairs, his convert's zeal could make the Conservatives look very tired and dull. He could enjoy pointing out that the Griffiths Report, with its chief executive for the Health Service, really suggests that the Government should create a new nationalis- ed industry.
A good Opposition, especially in the chamber of the House of Commons, will prefer to question this government's pretensions rather than to fight a repetitive battle of ideas. Sir Geoffrey Howe made sheepish by Mr Healey is better politics for Labour than Mr Kinnock preaching socialism and Mrs Thatcher preaching capitalism back. After all, the deficiencies of politicians are more striking and unalterable than their beliefs, and Mrs Thatcher has her share. The trouble is that this is not a good Opposition. It is small, tired, two thirds of it worried about reselec- tion, the other third too contemptuous of
the institution in which it sits to use it suc- cessfully. It will probably be left to the Con- servatives themselves to cause trouble for the Government. They are slow to get round to that sort of thing, but when they do they are good at it.
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