PERSONAL COLUMN

The fate of Nebuchadnezzar

DENIS BROGAN

'Stoning the Prophets is ancient news Like Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews' Chesterton's unkind lines have been much in my mind in the last week or so. For almost each day has complicated the political situa- tion in Britain, the United States, and indeed all over Europe. I have been struck by the number of things that are going wrong, and by the vanity of prophesying.

The spectacle of prophets falling on their faces has been, I suspect, giving pleasure since'the beginning of the human race. I am concerned with the situation in which pro- phets could be so wholly wrong in 1970 not only in Britain but in the United States where, despite the drum-beating of President Nixon and Vice-President Agnew, the great Republican wave which was alleged to be mounting in 1968 is now barely moving, and may be completely subsiding.

The results for political partisans in Bri- tain and the United States of such suspicions are always painful. So we have a great many plaintive letters explaining, or explaining away, the defeat of Mr Wilson (some of them in the journal, the New Statesman, edited by a former member of his cabinet); many are simply expressions of moral in- dignation that the great heart of the people has not turned out to be sound. In America the unfortunate and, perhaps, disastrous results of the mid-term Congressional elec- tions of 1970 have registered in a dramatic form against the stern and unbending rigidities of Mr Nixon's game plan: ie, a rigorous digestive discipline to purge the American body politic of the perilotis stuff • which was poisoning American political and economic life.

Discipline may have been supplied, but it has not purged the body. I had little belief that it would succeed, because, though my economic ideas may not be modern, I knew some of the purgers and find it difficult to believe that they had become any more sensible than they were a few years ago. So President Nixon (Cousin Dick as I call him—I am a Nixop on my mother's side) has sharply turned left, or, as possibly it would be better to put it, has turned right round. The days of a Spartan rdgime are to be over. Even that talkative Laconian, Vice-President Agnew, has not continued the prescription, possibly under firm orders from his boss, and the United States is now, as far as the White House is concerned, prepared to risk a good deal of inflation and a good deal of not let- ting the 'natural economy' have its own way.

I am not shocked by Mr Nixon's lack of consistency, and I am quite willing to believe what his friends say (which may not be totally flattering) that his basic views are still as stoutly conservative as ever, for if he wants to get re-elected in 1972 he will have to be less of a stern and unbending, old- fashioned Gladstonian financier than he had, by implication, promised to be when he entered the White House.

There is, of course, nothing very surprising in this. I can remember a very eminent civil servant telling me that you could discover very quickly, when a new cabinet was formed, what members were any good. He said eminent civil servants had the job of educating the new ministers, especially if they were novices. They had to point out that some things were in the pipe-line and could not be stopped. Some things could be stopped and should not be done for pruden- tial reasons. And there were a few things which should be done, and those things had better be done quickly. You could always tell whether a minister knew his business or not by the speed with which he grasped these simple principles. It is not very surprising that some ministers already appear capable and inspire hope, and not much reason for despair if some very new ministers have turned out to inspire alarm rather than hope.

A firm Prime Minister can get rid of them or shunt them off to some harmless and ineffec-

tive job. I have no doubt that' Mr Heath will have the ruthlessness which Asquith said was necessary. He will, when it is necessary, be 'a butcher'. I could suggest a few candidates for his butchery.

The limited success of President Nixon's policy (I am risking a meiosis) is most visible in the domestic field. Of course, if the Viet- nam war goes on, or if after the United States has withdrawn most of its garrison

from Vietnam, the whole political fabric of South Vietnam collapses, the troubles on the home front will be desperately aggravated by failure in South-East Asia.

But Mr Nixon must be praying to his Quaker ancestors that he will not have to face both the domestic troubles which are very visible and a fresh set of troubles in Asia.

In the same way, it is possible that Mr Heath will regret some of the imperial gestures he is making in South-East Asia

where he has very little margin. Failure in Asia is mare important from the political

point of view than ethical disturbance caused by supplying arms to the South African Republic.

For one of the oddities of recent polling signals is the fact that the difference between the support for Mr Heath and for Mr Wilson is still .not very great. I don't think there is any passionate desire to have Mr Wilson back in Downing Street, but there is not any overwhelming confidence in his successor. The British voter is like the traditional 'man from Missouri': he has got to be shown. But I think the main troubles that threaten the Heath administration are not in South-East Asia but may well be at home. I think that the authors of a remarkably intelligent book, not yet published in this country, on the realities of American politics, have lessons for 10 Downing Street and for wherever Mr Wilson is now housed.* I know one of the authors well. Mr Scam- mon was the director of the United States census, and is necessarily a master of the

*The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Ex- amination of the' American Electorate Rich- ard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg (Coward-McCann, New York, $7.95)

science or art of psephology. He is, in a strict sense, an outstanding figure in this field since he is one of the largest practising political scientists in the world. I think perhaps that he, like many experts, estimates the diagnostic character of his art or science a little too highly. But he does warn his readers that events not under his control or under Mr Wattenberg's control or under Mr Nix- on's control may upset what is his present judgment of the basic problems facing American politicians.

For Messrs Scammon and Wattenberg, it is what they call, rather ambiguously, 'the Social Issue'. This does not mean what it would probably mean at a Fabian Summer School. It is a kind of euphemism for the

problem of law and order, of internal discipline in the United States, and I have a vague and personalised belief that calling it 'the Social Issue' is rather like calling syphilis the social disease.

Messrs Scammon and Wattenberg 'are, of course, far too sophisticated statisticians to believe that this is simply a question of the

wickedness of the ill-disciplined. and irresponsible 'Blacks'. All these problems are

mixed up in an awkward and unedifying way. For example, I am more struck than Messrs Scammon and Wattenberg are by the fact that a great deal of crime in the United States is committed by the police, and perhaps an improvement in the discipline of the police and their political masters would be half the battle, but it would not be a popular 'half of the battle, so that I think they are quite right in saying that every racial and religious group resents disorder, and that includes Negroes and Mexicans.

What has this got to do with our situa- tion? I think it may have a lot to do with it, if there is a series of continuous strikes which have a political impact. I happened to be in Rome as Mussolini was taking over, and was later in Germany, just before Hitler took over, and I think that in each case the Fascists and. the Nazis got much more sup- port than it is now fashionable to admit. I

could have made a list—in fact, I did make a list—of strikes in the last week or two which,

I think, will backfire, possibly unjustly, on both Mr Victor Feather and on Mr Harold Wilson. These are strikes which throw many thousands of innocent workers into unemployment and may lead to an in- creasing number of very serious

bankruptcies, and to a spreading of the general belief that the Labour party is not now, whatever it was under Mr Attlee, a party of government.

True, a great many Labour intellectuals will not be able to see this. I can remem- ber Harold Laski in 1931 addressing an audience with immense panache, asserting and believing that the voters were going to rise in their wrath and punish the treason of Ramsay MacDonald : they didn't. And I suspect that if on a sufficiently dramatic occasion Mr Heath found himself 'forced' to dissolve Parliament, he would do ex- tremely well. I don't want a snap general election, and I am not sure I want an in- crease in the Conservative majority, but I can see a time in which a great deal of the rhetoric poured out by trade union leaders and Labour intellectuals will backfire, and we may be back in 1931, with the Labour party in for a long period of that searching for its policy and its soul which was so disastrous to the national health between 1931 and the outbreak of the Second World War.