Political Astrology
By ROBERT BLAKE HISTORY, we are told by austere experts, con- trary to popular myth, never repeats itself. No conclusions for the future can be drawn from the pattern of the past. Indeed, there is perhaps no pattern from which to draw conclusions. Happily, however, these severe warnings have never yet stopped people endeavouring to predict future events from historical analogies, and in no field is this more tempting than that of politics. What is going to happen when Mr. Mac- millan dissolves Parliament, as he must inevitably do, at the latest, two years hence? Does history give us any help? Certainly if past experience is any guide at all, a Conservative defeat would seem inevitable. Since 1867, when modern politics as we know them today really began, no party, except the Liberals at the second election of 1910, has won three general elections in succession— and the circumstances of 1910 were so peculiar that no relevant lesson can be drawn from them. At all events there is nothing on current form to suggest that the Conservatives will achieve a similar success. Indeed, on the face of things the problem is not whether they will win or lose, but whether or not they are heading for a land- slide comparable to the disasters of 1906 and 1945. The latter has perhaps too many special features to be a very profitable subject for the game of historical analogies, Not so the former : on the contrary, the parallel is so close that the political astrologers at the Central Office and Transport House must be reflecting, with equal despondency in the one case and relish in the other, upon its lessons.
Let us survey the political scene as it appeared two years before Balfour's sensational defeat: Then as now the party had won two elections running: Then as now the Prime Minister was a rich and rather grand sort of Scotsman—an in- tellectual, an able Parliamentarian, but somehow strangely incapable of projecting his personality before the mass electorate whose prejudices, hopes and fears determine the fate of governments. Moreover, like Mr. Macmillan, Balfour lacked the prestige of having personally led his party to victory. Indeed, his own succession to the Premiership had not been totally undisputed. A section of the party would undoubtedly have pre- ferred Joseph Chamberlain, the real architect of the previous electoral success. Mr. Macmillan's elevation was an even more closely run thing : almost every political correspondent (except Mr. Randolph Churchill, who was better informed) tipped Mr. Butler for the winner—and it is hard to deny that he had done more than Mr. Mac- millan, more perhaps than anyone else to give Conservatism the new look which has twice de- feated Labour in the 1950s.
There are other parallels. In 1903 Balfour ran into a Cabinet crisis of the first order : there were numerous resignations, including that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Defence then as now was a major problem. Arnold-Forster, the War Minister, made himself almost as unpopular with the generals as Mr. Sandys has with the top-ranking officers of all three Services—and that is saying something. Arnold-Forster was right, and Mr. Sandys may be right, but their policies were not and are not vote winners. Then again Balfour's administration carried a number of measures which, however correct and neces- sary, were extremely unpopular : the Education Act and the Licensing Act alienated voters then, just as the Rent Act and the long overdue cutting of the entrenched privileges of the farmers are losing votes today. Finally, there was a deep division in the Conservative Party on fiscal policy, tariffs v. free trade; and there is a comparable difference today, though it is far less public, be- tween Conservatives who favour a continued dose of deflation in order to preserve the pound and those who fear that such a policy will land us in a disastrous slump.
In the face of these adversities Balfour dis- played a remarkable coolness. So has Mr. Mac- millan. But, alas, sang-froid is not always enough. Lord Cardigan displayed the same quality at the charge of the Light Brigade. All Balfour's im- perturbability did not save him from leading his party to the most disastrous defeat in its whole history. What makes the picture today apparently even blacker is that the differences between Bal- four's situation and Mr. Macmillan's—for, of course, they are not parallel in every respect— suggest on the whole that Mr. Macmillan is even worse placed than his eminent predecessor. There was nothing in the 1900s comparable to the disastrous Suez venture. Lord Lansdowne may have had his defects as Foreign Secretary, but he was on almost any view a cut above Mr. Selwyn Lloyd. And Balfour did not face the danger of a third party splitting his vote. In his day the Liberals were the party menaced by this threat, and here perhaps history points a moral in reverse, for the Liberals did a deal with Labour. Can. Mr. Macmillan do the same thing with the Liberals? He would no doubt like to, just as Sir Winston wished to in 1951, but it takes two to make a bargain, and it is very probable that the two anti-Socialist parties will stilt be at each other's throats when the General Elec- tion takes place.
Yet if Mr. Gaitskell and his friends are unctuously rubbing their hands at the prospect of a landslide, let them pause and remember that there are other conclusions to be drawn from past history. Is it really true that the British public today is in the mood for one of those great upheavals, those silent constitutional, but none the less real, revolutions which every now and then put a radical government into power with a genuine mandate for sweeping legislative change? I very much doubt it. There have been only four such occasions in the last 150 years : 1830; 1868; 1906; and 1945. At intervals of nearly forty years, so it would seem, the radical cause triumphs for a brief but drastic period and thereafter things are never quite the same again. But when the convulsion is over politics settle down again and become a matter of the swing of the pendulum, the ins and the outs, conserva- tism, whether spelt with a big or a small `c,' being on the whole in the ascendant.
If there is anything in this diagnosis, the next general election is very unlikely to produce a government with the sort of mandate that Camp- bell-Bannerman had in 1906 or Lord Attlee in 1945. It is far too early for that, and there are none of the usual signs. The election is more likely to resemble that of 1880 or 1892, in which the Conservatives were defeated, but with little long-term damage to themselves or profit to their opponents. In 1880 Gladstone had a bigger major- ity than in 1868, but he neither had, nor felt that he had, a mandate for radical change. He be- lieved that he had won because of moral anger at Disraeli's imperialism. In fact, he probably won not so much because the public had moral ob- jections to Disraeli's policy as because the policy had landed us in disaster—the defeat at Isandhlwana, the massacre at Kabul. Suez 'has damaged the Conservatives today in just the same way and for the same reasons.
The safest prophecy, then, is that Mr. Gaitskell will win—by how much will depend on the policy of the Liberals and is, therefore, unpredictable —but that he will have behind him only a minority of the popular vote and none of the moral authority for a radical programme possessed by Lord Attlee in 1945. What, in view of this probability, ought Conservative policy to be now? If a landslide impended there would be a natural, though futile, tendency to try and steal some of the enemy's thunder in order to escape the reproach of being wholly reactionary in a progressive climate of opinion : for example, Disraeli carried a Reform Bill in 1867—and little good it did him, one might add. A similar temp- tation might arise if the election seemed nicely balanced with a real floating vote hesitating which way to move. But in the circumstances which actually prevail surely the right thing to do is to keep an eye firmly fixed on the next elec- tion but one and pass precisely those Conserva- tive measures during the next eighteen months which will cause a Labour government, seeking to pursue a drastic Socialist policy, the most diffi- culty if it leaves them intact and the most odium if it repeals them.
It is easy to forget what immense advantages Labour had in 1945 by inheriting the crushing taxation, economic controls and administrative tyranny imposed for war-time necessity by a Conservative-dominated coalition government. It is also easy to forget what Labour owed to the surprising amount of co-operation given by the world of the City and big business—still in- fluenced by sentiments of war-time good will. Mr. Wilson's contemptible smear campaign over the alleged Bank rate leak has ensured that his party will neither get nor deserve that co-opera- tion again—and this could be a very serious matter for them. As for the former asset, the war- time controls, it should be the Conservative policy `to set the people free,' and lower taxation. No one can fairly complain if they now start doing something about it : repeal every economic con- trol which can safely be removed; integrate Britain as thoroughly as possible with the Euro- pean economy; genuinely implement the Franks report; reduce powers of compulsory pur- chase to the minimum; deprive the govern- ment of every reserve power that might be tyrannously exercised; and, above all, go out with the record of a Budget which really reduces taxation. If Mr. Gaitskell has to begin by re- versing all these measures, his regime will not last long: Indeed, something far more surprising might occur. If a Conservative government were to carry out a genuine Conservative policy—ad- mittedly an unheard-of temerity in modern times —it might stagger the world, and itself, by actually winning the next election. At all events, it is hard to see what can be lost by trying.
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