Political commentary

Pounding the pavement

Ferdinand Mount

Margate Councillor Trevor Jones is haranguing the young Liberals on the mysterious arts of 'Community Politics'. This is not the Councillor Trevor Jones who achieved nearmythic fame as Jones the Vote, the man who could organise a Liberal victory at any by-election. The Liberals' local government high command has an inexhaustible supply of Trevor Joneses. This one is a lugubrious not very young Liberal in a jersey.

'We Liberals,' says Jones the Jersey, 'must plug the gap. Well, it's too big to be a gap, it's more of a . . 'he clutches at the air searching for the word.

'Void,' voice from the back of the hall (female).

'That's right, we must plug the void.'

But void-plugging is hard work. Liberal councillors apparently have to wear so many hats that many of them crack up under the strain and 'have to take a year off, twitching.' There's no shortage of policy. The Liberals have 'reams of policy' to plug up the draughty old void, but it's difficult `to present them to real people in the real world'. Can't think why.

Jones the Jersey gives way to Councillor Tony Greaves, another not very young Liberal, in a jeans jacket with a red beard, looking not unlike the wizard in Rupert the Bear. Councillor Greaves makes a brief announcement about the bus to the disco at Ramsgate, and then he sits down and disappears.

And I mean disappears. With surprisingly little noise, chair and Councillor Greaves hurtle through the screens at the back of the platform and plummet into the adjoining dining-room. Through the gap in the screens, we have a glimpse of startled diners raising their heads from the gammon and pineapple.

I don't want to knock the Lonsdale Court Hotel, but it does seem to be built on a somewhat restricted site. You go into the ballroom and before you know it you are in the dining-room. Still, it could have been worse. There is an unnerving notice on the door to the ballroom; SAFETY WARNING — The Ballroom leads directly to the Swimming Pool. And in the ballroom itself there is a notice saying No Snorkels or Goggles. The management appears to expect you to enter the ballroom at a gallop, dressed like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and unable to pull up in time before crashing through the glass doors at the far end.

However, Mr Greaves seems none the worse and gamely clambers back on to the platform to introduce a rather sweaty. Young Liberal in a sports shirt who tells us that 'we believe in a caring and compassion ate society which is an essential tenet of Young Liberal philosophy.' This speaker has a manner which is at the same time soapy and accusing; in another age, he would have been a curate. He provokes the urge to get up and bellow 'I believe in a hard-boiled, cynical and utterly ruthless society which guzzles petrol, clubs seals and builds lots and lots of motorways'. But wait, Sports Shirt has a message: tell you what community politics means. Look at that zebra-crossing opposite the Grand Hotel, it's a death-trap, cracked with potholes.' This provokes gasps of admiration, mingled with a certain chagrin that none of us spotted the fatal zebra for ourselves.

A sombre, bearded Liberal ups and says he doesn't think pavement politics are the be-all and end-all. On the other hand, was it not pavement politics that won us Sutton and Cheam — and Rochdale — and Orpington? The names of these ancient victories ring across the ballroom like the news of the Armada leaping from beacon to beacon in Macaulay's lay.

And yet when most Liberals start talking and passing resolutions, they tend to display a sententious superciliousness which makes you want to throw little fluffy cushions at them. The Young Liberals' resolution on economic growth says that 'sustained economic growth as conventionally measured is neither achievable nor desirable' and calls on the Liberal Party to develop a policy that 'does not depend on continued economic growth' and 'provides opportunities for socially useful work for all.' See how they like it on Merseyside when you tell them you don't want them to be better off 'as conventionally measured.' But then Mr David Alton, the current Young Liberal hero, won't be going on in that vein. He won the by-election at Liverpool, Edge Hill, by virtue of having attended to cracked pavements and unpaid pensions.

The Commission on Agriculture and Food in Britain and Europe — one of those Liberal soviets which help to while away the days before the party can bear to open the proceedings proper — begins its Questions for Consideration thus: 'What do we mean by healthy living? Do we eat too much? Should our policy include a view on what people should eat (i.e. in terms of health, energy inputs, conversion ratios, environmental .impact, demands on the Third World etc.)?'.

Very little, speak for yourself, and no are the answers to these questions. And not the least reason is because I do not fancy having to tell Claire Brooks, the junoesque chairman of the Commission, to reduce her environmental impact, not to speak of her demands on the Third World.

But do not some at least of these causes deserve a sponsor, and are not the Liberals genuinely plugging a void with which the other parties won't much bother themselves? And, to reduce the argument to a sub-Liberal level of calculation, have not the Liberals done themselves quite a bit of good by steering clear of the tricky questions?

At the General Election, they held 11 of their 14 seats. And their vote still seems to be holding steady which, if you are a Liberal and an optimist, offers a platform for a renewed advance to take them even higher than their 1974 peaks. The Liberals have only to sit quietly and talk about whales and seals to reap the harvest of unpopular governments and winters of discontent.

Certainly there are and always will be a large number of people who recoil from hard questions and political unpleasantness and who look for an innocent and painless alternative. All the same, I doubt if the Liberal prospects are quite as good as they were in the Sixties and early Seventies. I don't mean to prophesy their disappearance or even their diminution, but there may be a limit to their progress unless they brace themselves to adopt a more clear-cut programme which has some relevance to these disillusioned times.

The great economic events of the past five years seem somehow to have passed the Liberals by — the inflation, the strikes, the change of government. Here we have the most radical change of economic policy since the war and all that the Liberals — with the honourable exception of Jo Grirnond in last week's Spectator—can so far find to say about it is that 'this Assembly totally rejects negative and simplistic across-the-board cuts in public expenditure'. But do they believe that total government expenditure should he cut or not? Do they believe that the government's monetary policy is too lax, too tight or just right? Do they still want statutory controls on prices and incomes? Do they endorse the Tory tax cuts? We do not know for sure because these are not the things that most rank-and-file Liberals care most about. And so we have to wait for Mr Steel and his fellow Liberal MPs to make up the important bits for themselves as they go along, under pressure of events. Nothing more sadly showed the sham of the whole illusion that delegates at this conference hammer out their own policy than Monday afternoon in the Liberals' Commission on the Role of Trade Unions. There were some delegates in the perilous ballroom who said the closed shop was illiberal; and there were some who said it was a necessary protection which Parliament should not try to amend. Then Cyrili Smith a t hl rose t week h said d d the support that at pledged with JraP e support of all 11 Liberal MPs for the Conservatives' legislation, so that was that. The curious thing was that after Mr Smith had proceeded out of the ballroom into his gSka et ecsi acl hl ya rnet ienr feodr coend aFs oi fr dh eMhi ands t ne er ,v tehrehdeeelne