Political commentary
Oh for the firm smack
Ferdinand Mount
Bradford The man in the brown jacket came and sat down opposite me, very carefully as though not wishing to unbalance the train. 'I think,' he said, in a lowered voice like the contact in an old Eric Ambler, 'that we're going to the same place.' He sat quite still and expressionless, waiting for the countersign. 'Bradford, you mean?' He nodded, appearing to flinch slightly at the word. 'There's lots of them on this train,' he went on, after a pause in which you could listen to your own breathing; 'I've seen a couple of them . . . studying their agendas.' There was in his voice the quiet satisfaction of having spotted one of those tics that give away the master spy — the fingers drumming on the knee, possibly an actual shortage of fingers.
He himself was not a delegate, they didn't call them that. Just call him a supporter, from a place called Harwich, you wouldn't know where that was. And how were the Social Democrats in Harwich? Well, they hadn't in fact had a meeting yet but there might be a hundred of them. He was unimportant, just a labouring man, he said, an engine driver in fact — and here his voice sank to a whisper as if Mr Ray Buckton was about to slug him with a brake handle — but something had got to change. There was not the same attitude to work . . . young people today. . . and then the trade unions, you ought to see their balance sheets.
This tentative, furtive conversation with its sentences trailing away into silence and the shy yearning for things somehow to be put right seemed a world away from the confident high jinks of the Gang of Four on the train south from Perth. David Owen and Bill Rodgers had apparently been singing 'There's a hole in my bucket' to humorous words from the Liberal party songbook (public life demands many sacrifices). When they hit St George's Hall, Bradford, their voices boomed at us over the loudspeakers, rolling the old phrases round the rafters . . . end pingpong politics . . . break the mould . . . scale the impossible heights . . . search for consen sus.
Their followers seemed so modest and bemused by comparison. They talked into the wrong microphone. They said things like, 'I've got just one point to make and it may only be my parochial view but . .
And when they do get up a bit of steam, they start saying things like, 'If the first polarity we have to address is the tenurial polarity, then the second is the spatial polarity'. That was a Manchester member's answer to the housing problem, to which the next speaker, from Sheffield, riposted with a demand for 'enhanced perceptions by local authorities in their assessments of nonconforming land use.' I have never heard so many 'howevers' in my life. Such was the high level of gentility that you could unerringly detect instances, almost unique in political conferences, of the academic use of surnames, as in 'I agree with Marquand' — sharply to be distinguished from the mob orators' use of surnames as in 'Thatcher and her crew'. Nobody presumed to say 'Roy'.
This gentility was painfully obvious to the tough eggs from the Social Democratic Alliance who muttered, 'This country does not need two Liberal parties, we must broaden our social base first,' as though making a note to instal double glazing before the winter. Whatever they may say in public, the SDP leaders are clearly determined that this should be a 'top-down' party, an organised conspiracy to return a governing elite to power. The rank and file went through the motions of resenting this and desperately applauded any speaker who said, 'I came into this party because it was a democratic party', or 'I believed in David Owen because he was the only man with the guts to vote for one man one vote at Wembley'. Indeed, the rank and file may well vote to give themselves the right to choose their leader, as their Liberal allies already do. But most of the time they are going to be given their orders and they are going to like it.
The yearning which is usually described as a yearning for consensus could also be described as a yearning for authority, and for discipline. Ordinary Social Democrats are, I think, unique among modern British political activists in wanting nothing directly for themselves, no tax cuts or welfare benefits or fluoride-free water. What they principally want is to hear the firm smack of government again. Behind their shyness, they are a little chilling.
The most thrilling moment so far was when a row broke out at the lunch-time meeting of the Social Democratic Industry and Finance Group. The chairman, Professor Joan Mitchell, the grande dame of incomes policy in an eau-de-nil trouser suit, and the speaker, Mr Clive Bradley, formerly of Transport House, mumbled hopelessly as trade unionists complained that they were being excluded from the Group's activities and sent off to form their own separate group; all the worst Social Democratic insults were hurled — ghetto, apartheid, polarisation, second-class citizens. Then Shirley Williams seized the microphone and said. 'This is a very silly argument and you must stop it.' There was ecstatic applause at this sorting out. To be lovable and bossy is a combination hard to beat.
Personal authority is the SDP's most precious asset. Roy Jenkins deprecates `manifestoitis', claiming that all governments are undone by an excess of preelection commitments. In fact, the mistakes made by incoming governments often concern subjects on which they have taken up no predetermined view, such as the value of the pound. But in the case of the Social Democrats, the less said about their policies the better for their electoral chances.
I don't say that their policies are foolish. They hang together no worse than the policies of most parties. But they have the stale smell of the Sixties and Seventies about them. They cannot be made to sound new. And where they have had their sharper edges eroded with the years, they look even less distinctive. Even the famous SDP boost to the economy is to be only a mild boostette, according to Mr Jenkins, who I think is to be believed and trusted on this.
And it is on this belief and trust that the SDP continues to rest. With its emergence, we are indeed breaking the mould, but only to return to an older mould — of 18th century politics when one body of gentlemen proposed themselves as fitter for office than another body of gentlemen on the grounds that they had not had their fingers in the till and were not to be blamed for mishaps.
In such contests, victory depends on the number of magnates you can muster. And here there is no doubt that at Brighton the Social Democrats did suffer a setback in their otherwise triumphal progress. We stand and cheer each fresh defection from the Parliamentary Labour Party. Hurrah for Bob Mitchell. Three cheers for David Ginsburg. Stand up, stand up for Tom McNally. Yet if Tony Benn were now Deputy Leader, there might have been many more. If the SDP had not actually gained Denis Healey, at least the Labour Party might have lost him to Nato. And this tipping of the scales might have unlocked the Conservative Party too. Shirley Williams at Bradford let fall honeyed words for the courage of Ted Heath and Ian Gilmour in speaking out, but there is no sign as yet of any mad rush from the Right. Mr Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler defects in lonely splendour, bringing with him in his patronising manner to the delegates the unmistakable bay-rum-andTurnbull-and-Asser aroma of the To Party of the Sixties. Dissident Tory MPs can still hope either for a change of policy or a change of leader. Dissident Labour MPs can expect neither. By startling everyone with her decision to stand in the Crosby by-election ShirleY Williams may have confirmed the questions about her judgment. She ducked Warrington when most people thought she would have won and now she impetuously takes on a rather tougher but not impossible task. Even if she does win, paradoxically, there will be all the more reason for Tory rebels to stay inside the Conservative Party in the hope of getting their own way.
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