The Road to Blackpool . . . and After
TORY CONFERENCE PREVIEW
By ANGUS MAUDE, MP
IT is now two years since the Conservative party went into opposition after thirteen years of power. For a few months it seemed as if the interlude might be comparatively short; but by the end of 1965 it was already apparent that the Labour party would hold an early election and win it with a majority large enough to keep it in power for years.
Next week the representatives of the rank and file will gather at Blackpool for their first party conference since the defeat last March. Some will be determined on a thorough post-mortem, others hopeful of inspiration for the future. Many, to judge from the constituency resolu- tions on the agenda, are in a mood of bewilder- ment and frustration, scarcely knowing even where they want to be led.
The atmosphere of the conference is thus bound to be very different from that of 1965, when there was an election in the offing and a new policy document to be discussed. This year the party has suffered a most disturbing experi- ence: there has been a serious economic crisis, for which no one but the Government could be blamed; the Government has taken severe defla- tionary measures which on past form were bound to be unpopular; and yet the expected reaction of public opinion towards the Conservatives has been quite remarkably small. It is true that un- employment has not yet had time to develop at the accelerating rate that is now certain. It is also true that we have not had a marginal by- election to provide an acid test of voters' feel- ings. But there is still little enough in the opinion polls to comfort the afflicted.
It is therefore not surprising that the faithful should be complaining that the parliamentary Opposition is inadequate. No doubt they know in their hearts that there is little an Opposition can do when the Government has an unbeatable majority in the Commons. No doubt they realise that the next election will be won as much by the Government's inept handling of the economy as by anything else. Yet one must sympathise with them in their frustration. They want some- one to do something, and they know that there is nothing they can do themselves.
What they want their leaders to do is quite simply to make an impression on the country —to make the electors feel confident that there is a viable alternative government to Labour. The situation is thus at first sight very similar to what it was last January, when I wrote an article in the SPECTATOR which attracted some attention and even provoked some controversy. In reality, however, the situation is not at all the same. Then there was an election coming, with the chance of putting over a new policy to an electorate temporarily stimulated to politi- cal interest. Now there is not. Not only is there (quite rightly) no new Conservative policy, but the difficulty is to get the public to take any interest in politics at all. There is only what the Government is doing, and this will be applauded or reviled according to the effect it has on people's pockets rather than for what the Tories say about it. I believed last January—and I believe now—that there was still a chance then to make a genuine impact by means of a force- ful commitment to radical reform. No such chance is available to us now, unless the Govern- ment creates it for us. It may be a long business. In other respects, of course, the situation is better. Responsibility for the economic crisis is now seen to be the Government's, not ours. The Prime Minister has obligingly made it easy for the Tories to close their ranks on the two issues that were in danger of tearing them apart. On Rhodesia, the Conservative supporters and opponents of Mr Smith, aided by Mr Heath's common sense and remarkable balance on an exceedingly awkward tightrope, managed to agree on a policy of negotiation. This policy Mr Wilson duly appropriated, and his subse- quent conduct of it is more likely to hold the Tories together than to split them again—pro- vided nobody says anything too silly at Black- pool. Again, Conservative divisions on incomes policy are most unlikely to cause trouble, now that the Government is clearly in worse trouble. There is, however, one more serious change that has taken place in the last year. This is the increasingly desperate mood of the 'forgotten half' of the Conservative middle classes. These are the people some of whom once looked for political expression of their grievances to Mr Edward Martell, grievances which are now find- ing an increasingly vocal journalistic mouthpiece in Mr Anthony Lejeune and others. Nor, in- cidentally, are these feelings now confined to the middle classes; they are shared by many elderly and retired workers. It is easy to feel impatient with complaints which are often expressed in exaggerated terms, especially as the 'reactionary' prescriptions sug- gested are generally hopelessly unrealistic. Nevertheless, reactionaries are not always—or even often—wholly wrong. They may be poor guides to action; they may fail to understand the root causes of the symptoms that trouble them; but it does not follow, because they are reactionaries, that the things which they say are wrong are necessarily right. They may some- times seem to dislike everything about our 'society,' without realising that some of its features are inevitable and others merely tem- porary; but there still remain plenty of features that are genuinely deplorable. It is some sym- pathetic recognition of this that they want to hear from the leadership of the Conservative party. Some of them, I suspect, will be trying to say so at Blackpool, although the rational voice of genuine disquiet may well be drowned in the dreary old shouts for capital and corporal punishment. It will not be easy for the Tory leadership to sound as sympathetic as perhaps it might like to; for its eye is firmly fixed on the need to cap- ture the interest and support of the young, and criticism of the 'swinging society' (or whatever it's called this week) is thought to be upsetting to youth. Moreover, many of the features of this society were either deliberately created by, or were the natural results of, policies and acts of Mr Macmillan's governments. As a result, the Tories are to some extent getting the worst of both worlds. They appear to their older supporters to be carrying the politics of consensus to a point at which they become indistinguishable from their opponents. And they are not, I think, really making an impact yet on the young; for they have not yet managed to convey convincingly that note of idealism which is absolutely essential if the politi- cal enthusiasm of youth is to be profoundly stirred. A programme of material prosperity— even if larded with 'social justice'—is not enough. An attempt has been made—and one can con- cede its reasonableness—to stir the imagination of the young with visions of exciting technologi- cal progress. But there is one fatal snag in that Harold Wilson pre-empted this line in 1964, and did it very well; the fact that he has dismally failed to live up to his promises has tended rather to make people sceptical of those of Mr Heath and Mr Marples than to inspire a new en- thusiasm and allegiance.
It is possible that a note of genuine idealism in the Tory message would now attract both the disaffected old and the disenchanted young. For it is perhaps not widely realised that 'consensus' has almost destroyed one of the great creative tensions in British politics. However different the means proposed by each party to achieve it, the ultimate end of each has always been the welfare of individual men and women; but there has always been in politics a conflict between those who held a purely material concept of welfare and those who were sceptical of the material calculus. Today, however, an increasing number of people has become convinced that the accepted assumptions of all parties have transcended this conflict. The material calculus seems to have triumphed.
Of course, it was never easy to see exactly what the non-materialist school wished to sub- stitute for it, which is probably why it is in decline. It is hideously difficult to translate the instinctive recoil from pure materialism, from the too facile assumptions of economics about the nature and aspirations of men, into a pre- cise and attractive 'practical' policy. The result was often a great deal of vague talk about 'spiritual values.' Yet it does seem that an im- portant frontier has now been crossed.
The current consensus seems to many people to have gone well beyond the Beveridge ideal, the aim of which was still to remove the material obstacles inhibiting the 'good life'—in Beveridge's own words, 'a new war against Want, Disease, Ignorance and Squalor.' The parties now seem to make what is essentially a novel assertion: that even when these have been removed, a con- tinuing increase in material prosperity will of itself make the good life even better.
Now there are a great many people (and not only in the Conservative party) who, on the evidence before their eyes today, simply do not believe this. And one of the reasons why they do not believe it is that the assertion seems too readily to accept the assumption of that tech- nology which is offered as the road to prosperity. This is the conviction that prosperity is to be measured by increasing consumption—that we must produce more in order to consume more, and so on in an increasingly meaningless spiraL Tories, at least, have generally believed that there was more to the good life than mere consump- tion, and that the measure of the worth of a civilisation was at least as much to be found in what it created to endure as in what it consumed.
I have no doubt at all that the leaders of the Conservative party still believe this But they are suspected by many people of having for- gotten it, and it would be refreshing to hear the belief confidently restated. For the age of con- sumption does not seem to have made people happy; on the contrary, the conformist stan- dards of the 'consumer society' seem to be sapping the confidence of the individual in his ability to live by standards of his own. It is time to restore this confidence.
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