Political Commentary
Mr Callaghan's lost battle
John Grigg
With the turn of the year Mr Callaghan has ensured that he will not share with Lord Goderich the unhappy distinction of having only one date against his name in the list of British prime ministers. Even if his government were to fall during the next few months his entry would still be 'James Callaghan: 1976-7,' which at least would look better than 'James Callaghan: 1976.' But of course he hopes that his innings will be considerably longer and that, far from being a 'transient and embarrassed phantom' (as Disraeli described Goderich), he will rank as a successful leader of his party and of the nation.
The hope is not entirely groundless. Quite possibly he will still be prime minister not only at the end of this year, but at the end of the decade. He has already survived difficulties which would have destroyed a man temperamentally unfitted for the job, but he has many more—and perhaps worse—to face in 1977, and it is no help to him that last month his authority was badly dented when he failed to persuade the NEC to cancel Andy Bevan's appointment as Labour's national youth officer. At least he tried, but his failure was unquestionably a damaging blow to his prestige.
When I first wrote about him in this commentary I suggested that it might be his historic mission to dish the Labour left, as it was Baldwin's to dish the Conservative right. Nobody, surely, can doubt that he is a genuine moderate. Soon after he became prime minister he committed himself to the view that there was little or nothing to be gained from further extensions of the public sector, and in his speech at Blackpool he stated very clearly what was necessary to make a mixed economy work. In terms of national policy he has made few concessions to the left beyond those to which he was already bound by the manifesto, or which have been forced upon him as the price of maintaining his 'social contract' with the unions. But within the party organisation the left has scored heavily against him, and this has counteracted the psychological effect of his very substantial success in resisting the left's programme.
In the Andy Bevan affair especially, he has lost a major battle, but he can claim— echoing de Gaulle—to have not yet lost the war. He can also claim that Michael Foot's support for his line against Mr Bevan was itself a notable event, and that even Mr Wedgwood Benn's role in the affair is open to more interpretations than one.
Mr Bevan is a Benn protégé. The Energy Secretary defended the young man's appointment in a long statement, and he also voted for him at the NEC meeting on 15 December. The Guardian printed the statement in full and it is a masterly blend of the ingenious and the disingenuous. Apparently Mr Callaghan will have to answer questions about it when Parliament reassembles, and it will be fascinating to see how he deals with the sophistries of a colleague whom the public supposes to be a fanatical ideologue, but whom he himself must know to be a crypto-moderate.
Mr Benn's defence of the Bevan appointment is not, significantly, a defence of Mr Bevan's views, but rather an appeal that they should be tolerated within the Labour movement. 'Marxism,' he argues, has always been accepted as one of the movement's sources of inspiration, 'along with---though much less influential than—Christian socialism, Fabianism, Owenism, trade unionism, or even radical Liberalism.' Herbert Morrison, of all people, was a Marxist in his early days, seeking to permeate the Labour Party with Marxist ideas. He was, 'to use the common parlance, an entryist.' The clear implication of this part of the argument is that over a period of time Mr Bevan's views may develop and change as much as Morrison's did, and that practical work within the party will help them to do so.
In another passage Mr Benn says: 'The influences that lead individuals to embrace democratic socialism has [sic] always been left to the individual conscience, and there are no inquisitions to root out Marxists, any more than there are to root out Catholics, atheists, or followers of Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky or Milton Friedman.' (My italics.) Why does the name of Trotsky have to be dragged in? Because the militant tendency to which Mr Bevan belongs is .not just Marxist, but specifically Trotskyist. Trotsky, however, is in a different category from Smith, Freud, Friedman or even Marx, because he was a man of action. We have to judge him not only by his ideas, but also—and above all— by his deeds.
This is the point at which Mr Benn's argument becomes a trap for the unwary. While condemning those who treat Marxism as synonymous with communism, he does not scruple to treat Marxism as synonymous with Trotskyism, which is a far more serious misrepresentation. Marx never had a country at his mercy, but Lenin and Trotsky did and we know the tragic result. Russian democracy was strangled at birth. Anybody, therefore, who calls himself a Trotskyist (or, for that matter, a Maoist) is deliberately giving his allegiance to a tyrant.
In a letter which appeared in The Times on 15 December (the day of the crucial NEC meeting) Mr Bevan's fellow-secretary Nick Bradley—who is a member of the NEC—produced this humbug about Trotsky: 'Supporters of the Militant are repeatedly attacked as Trotskyists, as though this were an automatic stigma. But Leon Trotsky was the most consistent and tenacious opponent of Stalinist totalitarianism, and paid for this with his life at the hand of Stalin's assassin.' Trotsky was, indeed, an opponent of Stalin, but not of totalitarianism. He was himself a most ruthless totalitarian, who lost out to a cleverer, if less intellectual, rival. To be described as a follower of Trotsky is as much an 'automatic stigma' as to be described as a follower of Hitler.
Mr Benn is no Trotskyist. He is not even a Marxist, as he reveals in a parenthesis which has so far attracted too little notice. Even, he says, 'those non-Marxists who, like myself, are not part of that tradition, firmly believe that we must preserve within our movement a place for those who are—in exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reasbns, as we preserve other streams of thought.' (My italics.) But whatever may be said of Marx—a rabbinical visionary with perhaps rather more than a dash of the German authoritarian—the stream that came from Trotsky was not simply a stream of thought. He is directly responsible, with Lenin and Stalin, for a river of blood and tears unequalled in human history, and those who proclaim themselves his disciples have no place in any democratic organisation.
When Herbert Morrison called himself a Marxist the Labour Party was in its infancy and Trotsky, Lenin and Co. were obscure exiles. He could not have foreseen the horrors and crimes that would be committed in the name of Marx, and certainly he would never have bcome an explicit ideological adherent of one of the archcriminals. It is possible that Mr Bevan, Mr Bradley and others of their tendency may grow wise and mellow with age, but meanwhile democracy has to be protected against their dangerous infatuation.
The Prime Minister is an excellent speaker of the genial, down-to-earth, commonsensical kind, but he lacks Mr Benn's talent for oracular hocus-pocus. Yet it is necessary for the country, and perhaps vital for the Labour Party, that an overt moderate of comparable ability should state the case against indiscriminate 'toleration' of Marxists, while Mr Benn is deploying his gifts on their behalf.
The objective must be to drive a wedge— or rather to expose the natural and profound difference—between the hard and the soft left of the Labour Party. The hardliners are the only real danger, and they must be attacked. To 'tolerate' them, in the sense of allowing them to have a big share in party organisation and the evolution of party policy, is to betray the cause of democratic socialism.
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