Bright, beautiful morning
Allan Massie
St Andrews David Steel threw his arms wide, like a Man of God in a Hollywood epic, and Called out, 'Oh what a beautiful day.' And so it was: St Andrews in spring sunshine of- fers real snail's on the wing, lark's on the thorn, Pippa-passing stuff, but the mood of the Scottish Liberal Party Conference was such that Mr Steel could have uttered the sane cry, and been cheered, if a bone- Naar had been seeping in from the North Sea.
• Of course the Liberals had reason to re- -Knee. Hillhead was an achievement for then as well as for Roy Jenkins. After years In the wilderness the Promised Land is in sight. The Biblical story is being rewritten and Moses Jenkins will not be left gazing across Jordan from the Mount Pisgah of Hillhead. He will lead the people there himself with young Joshua at his side. If there was a note of relief mixed with the ex- ultation, that wasn't surprising either. Hillhead had been a close-run thing, and had looked very uncertain until the consti- tuency was swamped by Liberal Party Workers in the second week of the cam- Palm The victory represents the first parliamentary gain with which the Liberals have been associated in Scotland since the general election of 1966; the first by- election victory since David Steel himself won Roxburgh and Selkirk back in 1965. So naturally when the hero of Hillhead turned up on Friday afternoon, joy was Pretty well unconfined. (Not altogether; a couple of Young Liberals in front of me confined theirs pretty tightly.) He made all 'e right noises himself. He paid a glowing
tribute to Chick Brodie, the erstwhile Liberal candidate in Hillhead, who had gracefully stood aside to let him run. And then he talked of Asquith. He was going on to speak in Paisley that evening, and he ask- ed what -more a biographer of Asquith could wish for than to be in East Fife and Paisley, Asquith's two Parliamentary seats, on the same day of spring sunshine? The question was obviously rhetorical. All (ex- cept perhaps the two Young Liberals) were agreed that this touched the height of human felicity.
David Steel had talked of Asquith also; Roy Jenkins's decision to fight Hillhead 'was as critical to our public life as was Gladstone's to fight Midlothian and As- quith's to fight Paisley'. In the general euphoria it would have been unkind to recall that in Mr Jenkins's own words, 'Paisley was a false dawn, both for Asquith and the Liberal Party. At best it was the equivalent of some late winter daybreak on the fringes of the Arctic Circle .. the post- war Liberal revival never achieved more than a grey and short-lived light. By 1924 it was dusk again. By 1926, for Asquith at least, it was political night. Fortunately, on that exhilarating March afternoon in 1920, he could not foresee all this.'
Quite: well, back to 1982's exhilarating March afternoon ... it was perhaps tactless of Mr Steel to put forward a comparison of Roy Jenkins and Adtai Stevenson, for Stevenson is not exactly a name associated with success, but these less than hapy com- parisons were the only little clouds smaller than a bairn's hand, let alone a man's — in the blue sky. And the Asquith one at least had some point to it. It bound the Liberals and Roy Jenkins together (not such a difficult task, for, as Jo Grimond is reputed to have observed, the strength of the Alliance rests on the fact that David Steel is really a Social Democrat and Roy Jenkins a Liberal). More than that though, it belonged to the rhetoric which the Alliance is developing, at least in its Scot- tish Liberal articulation. The key names are Asquith, Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge, and the two key years are 1906 and 1945. In adopting this 'rhetoric, by no means insincere, the Alliance is presenting itself as the natural heir to the two great reforming governments of this century. It is rhetoric that has a powerful appeal.
Scottish Liberal Party conferences do not usually lay claim to any great public impor- tance. This one was an exception, and pro- ceedings were eagerly scanned for significance. David Steel's speech was not, by his standards, a good one, but it sound- ed notes which will be struck more loudly in the election campaign. It is unusual to hear a Liberal blowing the law-and-order trumpet, but Mr Steel did so, deploring Ken Livingstone's criticism of Sir Kenneth Newman. These were government-in- waiting noises, clearly bidding for Tory votes.
On foreign policy and defence he stuck to what one may call the Guardian line: El Salvador and Trident. But these issues may have a wider appeal. Certainly Tory workers during the Hillhead campaign con- fessed themselves surprised and dismayed by the strength of anti-Trident feeling in the constituency, even among natural Tory voters. There's no doubt that Trident is an issue on which the Government will lose votes in Scotland, particularly in the west.
He was shakier on economic policy, part- ly because here, at least, the Alliance's claim to be a reforming party is least substantial. It's clear enough after all that, compared either to Mrs Thatcher or to Mr Benn, the Alliance offers no attempt to change the balance of the mixed economy. So Mr Steel was reduced to waffle. More work should be created. It was wasteful to spend money on the dole, when there was so much useful work to be done, like, well, like clearing up inner cities, repairing pavements ... Not once did he refer to the prime economic problem, which is how to create greater wealth, capable of paying for such useful work, without encouraging in- flation.
But the greatest interest at the conference was shown in the purely Scottish issue of devolution. Mr Jenkins had been pushed at Hillhead into offering a much stronger commitment to this than many in the SDP, especially centralists like Bill Rodgers, might wish, and the Liberals were determin- ed to bind him to his promises. For a start, prompted by Menzies Campbell (Edin- burgh advocate, former Olympic sprinter and excellent Parliamentary candidate for East Fife), the Liberals have abandoned the word 'devolution', with its overtones of bureaucracy and centralist condescension and with its pejorative association with the Scotland Act, and reverted to the Gladsto- nian 'Home Rule'. And they have come out for a much stronger measure of Home Rule than the Scotland Act yielded, with revenue-raising powers granted to a parlia- ment (not an assembly) and with the pro- mise 'immediately on presentation of a Bill for Home Rule in Scotland, to set up a commission whose remit shall be to report to the Scottish Parliament, with proposals for single-tier local government throughout Scotland'. In short, the Liberals' message for Scotland is `to leave the SNP to Jim Siliars, and join us as a serious political force that can achieve a parliament for Scotland'. This is something to which the Scottish Liberals have been committed for a hundred years. It looks a possibility again. Any SDP disinclination to accept is the most obvious rock on which the Alliance could founder in Scotland.
We could be seeing the appearance of a new polarisation of Left and Right in Scotland, as the SNP's drift to the left — the party is moving to a position where it will be committed to a socialist independent Scotland — makes it for the first time a threat to Labour rather than to the Conser- vatives. That would mean the Alliance and the Tories dividing the anti-Socialist vote, with the Tories retaining Unionist voters and the Alliance taking Home Rule ones, while, across the great divide, the SNP tried to snatch votes from that inert hulk, the Labour Party in Scotland, wedded to a rhetoric of socialism many of its members distrust and to a promise of devolution few really believe they will deliver. Yet, since the SNP will not quickly attract supporters on the left to replace those they have lost on the right, and since the Tories and the Alliance may be almost equal in strength, the electoral carve-up is still likely to see Labour emerge as by far the strongest party in Scotland. Its share of the vote may con- tinue to decline; but it will probably win almost as many seats. The mould of Scot- tish politics is likely to remain unbroken.
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