LIBERALS
1951 and all that
JOHN MacCALLUM SCOTT
Shortly after the 1951 election the SPECTATOR published a letter from me pointing out that there were other ways of being an effective Liberal than through the Liberal party. The consequences were immediate and alarming. I was excoriated by the party executive and booed at the post-mortem party conference. Mr Clement Davies, who a few days earlier had been urging me to reconsider my resignation from the Liberal party com- mittee (which in those days was a hopeful kind of shadow cabinet), hastily put pen to paper to say that perhaps it would be a good thing to have in some new blood after all. Since then my relationship with my party has been increasingly peripheral. Shortly after the 1951 election the SPECTATOR published a letter from me pointing out that there were other ways of being an effective Liberal than through the Liberal party. The consequences were immediate and alarming. I was excoriated by the party executive and booed at the post-mortem party conference. Mr Clement Davies, who a few days earlier had been urging me to reconsider my resignation from the Liberal party com- mittee (which in those days was a hopeful kind of shadow cabinet), hastily put pen to paper to say that perhaps it would be a good thing to have in some new blood after all. Since then my relationship with my party has been increasingly peripheral.
Now we have come full circle and are back to 1951, but with the, difference that no less an authority than Mr David Steel me is now saying that Liberals could exercise some influence by voting for liberal-minded Con- servative and Labour candidates. It is nice to know that my party is now catching me up, indeed exceeding what I said on that earlier occasion; but I am afraid that over the last nineteen years my thinking has advanced a great deal further than that.
It is true, of course, that the party's vote has tripled since 1951, even though its parliamentary representation remains about the same. Unfortunately, politics is about power, not about justice, as the Liberal party itself discovered during its final period of overall majority when it pigeonholed a report recommending the introduction of proportional representation. No party is going to change the electoral system that put it in power, and if Liberals want to be effec- tive, as distinct from just being, they must cast around for new methods of doing so.
The first step is to get rid of the mythology in which they have steeped themselves since 1945. It has two main themes. The first is that the Liberal party still pioneers liberal policies that are eventually adopted by their rivals. It does nothing of the sort. The idea of a United Europe was pioneered by Winston Churchill as leader of the Conservative party. Withdrawal from East of Suez was pioneered by the Labour party. Opposition to Vietnam was pioneered by the Com- munists. The image presented to the public by the latterday Liberals is not that of a brilliant group of intellectuals pointing the way, but rather that of assorted groups of enthusiasts marching and waving flags in the wake of an astonishingly wide variety of Salvation Army bands.
Certainly the party does try to pioneer some eminently sensible proposals, such as co-partnership and regionalism, but nobody, alas, pays any attention. Co-partnership is rejected on both sides. In so far as regional- ism has made any impact, it has been due entirely to the Welsh and Scottish national- ists. The fate of these policies offers proof of the Liberal party's ineffectiveness rather than of its value.
The second theme of current Liberal mythology is that there is no other way for Liberals to be effective than through an in- dependent Liberal party. This is even more demonstrably false. Who have been the most effective Liberals, or one-time Liberals, of recent years? Winston Churchill for one. Selwyn Lloyd for another. The National Liberals too. On the other side, Sir Dingle Foot and Lady Megan Lloyd George have done far more to mellow the Labour party than pressure from the Liberal party. And if I was asked to nominate a Liberal trade unionist, I would chalk up the name of Mr Feather. And who are the effective members of the Liberal party? One can really only think of Mr Peter Hain, and I imagine, or hope, that he is more of a free-lance than a party man. When one comes to think of it, the only substantial Liberal reform in- troduced recently was the banning of resale price maintenance, and that was forced through by Mr Heath against strong op- position from within his own party.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Liberal party is now counter-productive. It monopolises a very splendid word, and the only real success it can claim is in making people think ill of it. I could name large numbers of able Liberals whom it has driven out of political life but who are now working in other spheres to effect Liberal purposes. It has been said with some justice that the most significant Liberal event of 1969 was that shortly after the party retreated from Smith Square the Institute of Economic Affairs moved into the same area. The Institute is composed largely, though not exclusively, of former Liberal activists only a few of whom are still closely associated with the party, but its influence is growing steadily.
So much for the mythology. What about the facts? Looking round the world, the country which has been most successful in creating and developing a Liberal way of life is the United States. A Liberal society is not a perfect society; it is one that allows a max- imum degree of freedom, and freedom, when indulged in, produces many excrescences. `How could a Liberal country produce a man like Senator McCarthy?' people often used to ask (meaning the odious Senator from Wisconsin, not the recent Presidential can- didate). The answer is that it not only pro- duced him, but it also excreted him, peacefully and without resort to illiberal pills. America's Liberal metabolism is wonderfully sound, and it operates without benefit of a Liberal party. The Liberal battle takes place within the parties, not between them, and, by and large, it is waged there more successfully than in any other part of the world—except possibly Switzerland, but that is a very special case.
If British Liberals want to be really effective, they should disband their party and allow their members to work within its rivals. Mr Thorpe would be a much more effective Liberal within the Labour party. I could name a number of others who could do an equally good job in the Conservative party, but I would not like to embarrrass them at this stage by associating them with the hereditary enemy. Mr Grimond could have a glorious future as Independent Member for Scottish Affairs, which is where he will almost certainly end up anyway.
It was, incidentally, Mr Grimond who proclaimed the Liberal party to be a radical party, a 'radical party of the left' if I remember his phrase correctly, though I have yet to learn what precise meaning he imported into these two Humpty-Dumpty words. What I do know is that the first duty of a radical is to be radical about himself, about his beliefs and about his own practice. This country stands desperately in need of effective Liberalism. It can have it only if the Liberals will take a tumble to themselves. Mr Steel has, happily, pointed the way. He should march firmly along it.
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