Ambition, compassion, no vision
"My Government's objective throughout," said the Queen in her speech opening the new session of Parliament, "will be to promote the interests of the individual, whether as citizen or as consumer." Thus has Mr Heath, speaking through the Throne, struck the opening note of his next general election campaign, a note which will resound again and again through ministerial speeches for as many months as lie between us and the day on which the electorate will pass judgement on the political revolution begun in June 1970. Even if it lasts its full time, this will be the last full session of the present parliament, and everything said and done by politicians of all parties from now on will be said or done with that fact in mind. The Gracious Speech, and the programme it delineates, must therefore be examined in the awareness that it has something of the character of a final testament by the Prime Minister and his colleagues.
It is therefore surprising that the Government's business managers in Westminster make no secret of their belief that the programme itself will meet with few difficulties on its way through the House of Commons. Its more obviously cosmetic elements — like legislation on pornography, the removal of sex discrimination, and the provision of better facilities for crowds attending sporting occasions — will be knocked about the floor of the House of Commons with the Opposition stridently claiming that they would have gone further in whatever direction they judge the puWic will approve. The heavier work of the session — and notably the reform of company law — will provoke some searching and technical debates, but not serious or outright opposition. The conviction of ministers and their managers is, however, that such controversy as erupts in Westminster, and such political strife as ultimately determines their fate, will be about day to day economic management, and not about legislative propositions.
This attitude of mind can be explained only by reference to the failure of the Government to bring about through legislative reform the quiet revolution promised in 1970. Certainly, some of the things then promised, some of the things designed to alter the character of the country and set the nation on a new historical road, have been enacted: we are in the Common Market — though with precisely what result for our ultimate fortunes, or the ultimate fortunes of that alliance, no one can be sure; and our pensions structure has been totally re-designed. Other policies have been tried and have failed or are felt by ministers to have failed: the Industrial Relations Act is moribund and the attempt to create a truly capitalist economy has been abandoned. It is accepted that the country is in a critical economic situation which legislation has failed to resolve, and that the Government must fly by the seat of its pants — with Phase Three and perhaps Phase Four, with some further juggling of industrial subsidies, some bonuses for pensioners, and some further pious statements of good intentions — until, it is hoped, a general election victory Provides an opportunity to start again.
The question that must enter into the minds of those who voted Conservative in the last general election, whether they were loyal Party members or were merely attracted to the Conservative cause for the moment by the conviction that Mr Heath would be able to pull the country out of the slough of despond into which it had for years been sinking steadily deeper, must be whether this Government would in fact make a fresh start if given a new mandate. There are few Conservatives who would find anything attractive in the Labour programme, though there might be a strategically sufficient number willing to vote for Mr Wilson in order to destroy Mr Heath's European policy. But there are many who, in the present political climate, would be sorely tempted to stay at home, not just because inflation has not been defeated, not just because the Government has changed its mind on some of the more important undertakings in its 1970 manifesto, but because the distinctive, crisp, bracing, hard-headed, uplifting tone of the Heathian Toryism of that year has been softened afid blurred; because these ministers, entering their fourth year of office, have begun to look and sound like any other bunch of reasonably well-intentioned politicians, endowed with ambition and compassion, but not with vision.
What was promised more than anything else in 1970 was an increase in the personal freedom of the citizen. It was not — though that is, too, a good cause — an increase in consumer protection, or a greater measure of taxation and state-financed molly-coddling. What was promised was that ministers would look after the national interest, strengthen and re-assert the character of the nation considered as a nation — inside or outside the EEC — while giving to the individual a greater opportunity to look after his own interests, decide what they were and act accordingly. Nothing like that dream has been fulfilled; and if one assumes, as many people do, that the Labour Party would fail, as they failed before, to implement anything like the radical proposals of their programme, then the distinction between the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet that the voter must make unless he is to stay at home on election day, might just as well be made on grounds of individual competence and individual niceness or nastiness. The distinctiveness of Toryism appears to have vanished. The distinctiveness of socialism is merely a vague threat.
It is an open question whether the Government can do anything about this. As they recognise, ministers have too little time before the next election to assert their claim to a renewed mandate on any grounds better than their capacity to keep the economy going from day to day. They accept, too, that a lot has gone wrong since June 1970: crises unbargained for arose; cherished policies were abandoned in panic or defeat; events overcame intentions. All that can be done between now and the day of reckoning is to struggle along and hope. All that can be done: but some things can be said, long before the researchers and the advisers get down to drafting the next manifesto. What can be said is what Conservative ministers would do with a new mandate, whether they would merely regard its award as a confirmation of the rightness of their present sloppy, inefficient managerialism, or whether they could once more lift their heads and look to a Tory future. True, they may be too shamefaced to try that again. True, they might not be believed. But many Conservative ears will, over the next year or so, be cocked to hear the now muted voice of their creed, cocked to hear the answer to the question of what Mr Heath now really means by promoting the interests of the citizen as citizen.
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