Political commentary
The year of the Tories?
Ferdinand Mount
Mr Ian Mikardo is commonly thought to be a downy old bird. Because he runs a book at the House of Commons, he enjoys the reputation for supernatural cunning generally accorded to bookmakers — who in practice need only a grasp of elementary arithmetic. His well-sucked pipe, his owlish eyebrows and horn-rims, his long marination in Labour Party politics and East-West trade augment this byzantine reputation. But like those celebrities who are well-known primarily for being well-known, Mr Mikardo's real cunning lies in being universally regarded as cunning. 'Old Mik knows a thing or two,' they say. lie is not only a past chairman of both the Parliamentary Labour Party and Labour's National Executive. He is also a specialist in downyoldbirdmanship.
It was instructive therefore to watch the DOB taking on a bunch of young — well, younger than DOB — Tory MPs on the Brian Walden show. The entrepreneurial system (wave of pipe) is on the way out, said Mr Mikardo, small businesses are being squeezed out (lift of eyebrows) by big business. In my own constituency, he said, the little tailors (pipe jab) are being forced out of business by big concerns (eyebrow hoist) like Montague Burton. Montague Burton — now there's a pippin of ignorance, a splendiferous piece of intellectual fossilisation. The choice of Montague Burton a's the example of omnipotent big business suggests not 'only that Mr Mikardo has failed to read the newspapers which reported seven months ago that Burton's were in desperate trouble and would have to close down one third of their tailoring capacity and fifty-seven of their high street shops (the company's loss for this year has eventually worked out at £13.6 million). It suggests also that the Downy Old Bird is still living in the days of the Fifty Shilling Tailor's glory when Sir Montague held sway over his staff of midgets at Sunninghill (legend had it that all employees has to be at least i" shorter than the pint-sized suiting czar, who incidentally was a model employer and did much to abolish the sweatshops). Burton's difficulties are a perfect demonstration of what happens to any firm, regardless of size, that has failed to meet the demands of a changing market, in this case, the demise of the cheap bespoke suit and the rise of jeans — which, it so happens, were very often designed, produced or imported and retailed by small firms. But in the mental world of the left, a firm does not prosper or decline merely according to whether it supplies its customers with things they want at a price they are willing to pay. For the left, the growth of a firm is a Malig nant cancer and its failure the result of dirty work at the crossroads of history. This kind of old-fashioned rubbish is discredited over and over again by experience. If Mr Mikardo doesn't know why Burton nearly went bust or why nationalised industries are unpopular, or why people don't 'buy British Leyland cars, everyone else does. And every time old leftists like Mr Mikardo appear on conference platforms or on television and every time their voice prevails in Labour's national executive, the electorate is forcibly reminded that they represent a future that didn't work.
This is one Tory advantage which cannot be chipped away by the most prolonged chiselling by the Prime Minister. There is no election date which could cancel out the general understanding that whatever else the Labour Party may represent, it does not stand for a market society. Far from mattering less as time goes by, this matters more as the failures of socialism become more painfully visible.
And it is this advantage which helps to explain what would otherwise be rather surprising: the tenacious confidence arhOng most Tories that Mrs Thatcher will win the next election. After all, Mr Callaghan has drawn level in the opinion polls (though by no means in actual by-election results). There is the prospect not only of the swelling gurgle of North Sea oil but also of a temporary dip in the inflation rate and a growth in real living standards as well as a continuation of respectable financial statistics — all equally temporary no doubt but widely thought to impress the simple voter. Nor is it as though the Conservatives were celebrated for their castiron nerves. They are in general a nervous lot, always have been. Apprehension is what keeps them going, just as indignation is the fuel of the left. Defeat at they polls always provokes some Conservatives to moan that `this means we're out of power for a generation.' There is no one like a thoroughgoing Tory for revelling in declines and falls. The barbarians have taken over; civilisation is doomed; we are all goners. Doesn't matter whether the date is 1974 or 1945 or 1911, the lament has the same tone as Lord Salisbury's dirge over the 'Conservative surrender' of the 1867 Reform Bill: 'The transfer of power has been complete . Few care by injudicious frankness to incur the wrath of the new masters whose rule is inevitable now . . we have taken a step that can never be recalled. . . the very conditions under which our institutions exist have been changed; the equilibrium of forces by which they have been sustained is 'shaken. The defence on which we have been wont to rely has proved utterly rotten . . . The meetings in the manufacturing towns, and the riots in Hyde Park, have had their effect. The comfortable classes had no stomach for a real struggle.'
This kind of pessimism seems, however, to be more the result of a foreboding type of temperament than A rational deduction from experience. The Tories who now think Mrs Thatcher cannot win are the Tories who always thought she couldn't. Pessimism is, I suppose, a kind of historicism. And the incorrigible pessimists have succumbed to the historicist fallacy of mistaking the simple Tory cock-up of 1974 for a major crisis of capitalism — an alarmist view clearly disproved by the subsequent bumblings of the National Union of Mineworkers.
Not that the present Tory Party does not have nasty problems. It is very short of cash, for one thing. As always, Labour and the Liberals are still worse off, but there is a certain equality in poverty. The prolonged shortage of money has contributed to the squabbles inside Central Office, although the organisation is faulty too (the simple answer is to revive the old managing director's job of Director-General). The party has, with a rather flagellant purity, blocked the only exit by what one senior official described to me as its `cultural block' about accepting money from the state (beyond that now granted for running the Whips' office).
But against all that, the predominant feeling among the optimists remains that the tide is running too strongly in the Tories' favour to be turned back. The PM cannot be everywhere all the time. Even he cannot permanently disguise the nature and intentions of the party he leads. Every now and then, fresh plans for a wealth tax inevitably pop out of the NEC or Mr Foot or Mr Berm will call for a rebirth of the 1945 spirit — utterly failing to realise that for most people 1945 does not mean unselfish comradeship and national unity. It means rationing, austerity and red tape. It means being shabby and cold. It means snoek and powdered egg. And modern electorates do not generally vote the Savonarola ticket.
The implication of this argument, however, is that this is one election that has to be won by the opposition. The Tories have to impose their own version of history and their own critical text of the Labour manifesto. And the sooner Mrs Thatcher develops her critique, the more chance she has of dictating the terms in which the argument is to be conducted. This is a matter not only of persuading people that a shift in the direction of the free market will benefit everyone, not merely the go-getters, but also of exposing the fraudulence and hollowness of Labour's alternatives — the industrial strategy, the planning agreements, industrial democracy of the Bullock type and all the other instruments of producer sovereignity. The Tories may have better tunes, but they have yet to discover how to turn the volume up.
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