POLITICAL COMMENTARY
The silent majority
DAVID WALDER
Already the polling cards and election ad- dresses are falling softly through the letter- boxes into a few million homes and the public meetings have been advertised. Nevertheless it would be difficult to say that election fever grips the land. The public meetings will be poorly attended. If you live in a small village you may well be intensively canvassed but if you are in a large town it is unlikely you will be bothered. In any event, of all those entitled to vote, only about three out of ten will bother to go along to the polling station on the day. Not, of course, that any of these known facts will prevent the political parties from appearing to attach enormous importance to the results of this month's and next's local government elec- tions as some indication of the likely result of the coming general election.
I use the word 'appearing' deliberately, because inevitably I have my gravest suspi- cions of the sincerity of the party seers on these matters. Suspicion mixed with sym- pathy, for they are plainly in an impossible position. To play safe and make no comment at all would be discouraging in the extreme and simply leave the field open to the fatuous generalisations of the professional psepholo- gists, poised to inform us that, if the results for the Netherford RDC are reproduced throughout the land, we shall have a Liberal government with a majority of a hundred in 1971. So, like the soothsayers of ancient Rome, when they scrabbled about with the innards of some sacrificial bird or beast, they are expected to look wise and confident while producing some pleasing if ambiguous pro- phecy.
For the truth is that local election results judged as material upon which to found predictions are, to use a favourite expression of Field-Marshal Montgomery's, 'a dog's breakfast.' Anything like a controlled ex- periment is just not possible when in ad- dition to Tories, _Socialists and Liberals, there are Independents, genuine and transparent, Ratepayers, and heaven knows what else besides. This time in London there will also be the Homes Before Roads can- didates; for all I know in some other part of the country there may be Roads Before Homes candidates. In addition to the variety of candidates there is also a vast divergence in the degree and nature of the electoral response.
In rural areas and small townships it is still possible to vote for Fred who runs the garage or Margaret who does the Red Cross.
In the large cities one is frequently presented with portraits of three men and/or women whose names and faces fail to arouse the slightest squeak of familiarity, only to read that Quince, Snug and Peaseblossom have been sitting on ipagisterial benches, chairing school and hospital - committees and generally killing themselves on one's behalf for the last couple of decades. Even so, it is only in the field of local government that it is still possible for the political archaeologist to dig up any satisfactory evidence of more than mere handfuls of voters preferring a candidate to his party label. (In a general election the melancholy statistic, so one is assured, is that no man, however good or bad, can mean more than 500 votes plus or minus to his party.) There are also some intriguing pockets of opinion. Certainly in the big cities there are those who endeavour consistently to vote against that party locally which is in power nationally, `to keep the balance' as they say—or, as Tennyson put it more sonorously, 'lest one good custom should corrupt the world'.
Now since all these curious reactions are to be found among those who do vote, one must ask in vain what it is, whether in- difference or principle, that keeps the others, the majority, away from the polls. Perhaps the feeling expressed by an elderly lady in Glossop is more general than commonly supposed. She was asked by a research team from Manchester University a question which had proved most useful and revealing in America: 'Who are the important men in this town?' She replied : 'They are all dead.' I have still not decided whether that answer justifies or refutes the contention behind the Redcliffe-Maud proposals.
Yet out of this mass of very individual opi- nion Tories and Socialists and Liberals will seek to find encouragement for their national policies. The Labour party, as the only one having any choice in the matter, will doubtless regard the way the results go as being relevant to its timing of the general election. As if to make sense out of con- fusion the basic assumption both at Transport House and in the Conservative Central Office is that on a very low poll only party stalwarts vote, abstention being the only protest possible. Even if the Council does dig up father's grave to make a sewer, so runs the argument, a good party man may stay at home but will not actually go over to the enemy.
All of which, I must confess, does make me wonder at times if they really do know what they are talking about, either locally or nationally. Not only the party pundits, gurus and brahmins but all of us, politicians, political journalists, psephologists, com- mentators, the lot. Are we all engaged in one grand, innocent, but self-deluding con- spiracy? Do we only accept and regard what we have been conditioned to accept and regard? Certainly in the last twenty years politics has become more professional and its study allegedly more scientific. That in the process its practice and its practitioners have seemed to become duller may be regrettable, but would seem to be almost inevitable.
More certain is the fact that all the means– for disseminating propaganda and ascer- taining reactions have become infinitely more complex. At first sight this must logically lead to greater efficiency. Opinion polls must be more effective than what Baldwin called 'talking to the station- master'. Yet there can be no doubt that modern political parties, armed with all their resources, still only scratch at the surface of the electorate's enthusiasms, hopes and fears and prejudices. Anyone who doubts this need only go canvassing in any election, parliamentary or local, and note the ques- tions which, with no prompting, come his way. I guarantee that any relation between the voter's first question and those which either of the parties thinks he should, or will, put will be largely coincidental What this phenomenon produces in prac- tice is the politician's first rule of self- preservation : avoid giving offence. And this uninspiring sentiment has unfortunately become erected into a principle of almost universal public observance—broken in re- cent years only by Mr Enoch Powell. (Some part of his popularity is plainly attributable to the fact that, irrespective of the validity or wisdom of his views, in this respect he is `different'.) But if politicians seemingly find it difficult, if not impossible, to get to grips with a large number of problems which ex- ercise the minds of their electors how can they go one further and pretend, even with the help of many experts, to predict voting reasons and intentions?
The obvious counter-argument is that such predictions are frequently very accurate indeed, and that what the opinion polls tell us is important does turn out in the end to be important. Nevertheless the fact that in local elections up to seven in ten people and in general elections up to three in every ten do not consider the issues or the policies im- portant enough to merit a vote at all cannot be without significance. The opinion pollsters ask questions or seek opinions on specific issues and the parties offer a sort of lowest common denominator by way of policy which ropes in most people one way or the other. But in every constituency at every general election there are still about ten thousand voters who do not vote, and who could if they wished and were of one opinion overturn many a comfortable ma- jority. Why they do not vote no one really knows; not all of them are absent, they are not all 'don't knows', nor can they all be anti-vivisectionists and the like who are dis- appointed with all the candidates.
Even the most general image of the parties—Tory, efficient but tough, Labour, kindly but incompetent, Liberal, almost anything you like in between—has failed to spark them off. To the opinion polls and the party organisations their identity, com- position and motivation are entirely unknown: Which brings me back to this whole business of prediction which today so permeates, influences and bedevils politics and policy-making. Its sole claim to attention and authority lies in its vaunted near-in- fallibility, and I am prepared to admit its un- canny accuracy on many occasions. Yet there is an energetic canvassing lady of my acquaintance who is capable of looking at the plants in a garden or the colour of a front door and judging thereby the politics of the occupier. Roses, for instance, as one might expect, are staunchly Tory. Hoping to con- fuse, I once led her to a garden chockful of stone and plastic ornaments. 'Those gnomes are Liberal', said she, firmly. Need I bother to add that she was right?
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