Another voice
Indulging in personalities
Auberon Waugh
There must have been a certain poignancy in the scene when Mr Foot was preparing to unveil his party's alternative economic strategy to a rally of the unemployed in Cardiff last Saturday, but found himself shouted down and unable to unveil it after all.
Newspapers, for the most part, decided to treat his Grand Alternative Strategy (GAS) as if it had been unveiled to plan. Mr Foot proposes to do everything nice — reduce taxes 'for working people', create 'jobs' for those unworking, vastly improve the social services, increase expenditure on education and everything else — and pay for it with increased borrowing. What's wrong with that, eh? It has always worked in the past. The only people who are seen to suffer are those foolish enough to have savings in fixed interest or equity investments, life assurance or retirement policies. Against GAS we have the Government's response of declaring that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to its declared policies of good housekeeping while not, in fact, actually pursuing them.
There we are. So far as the actual issues are concerned, the battle lines are drawn. On the one hand, Mr Foot's Grand Alternative Strategy, which he did not, in fact, dare unveil, on the other Mrs Thatcher's unshakable belief in the principles of good housekeeping which she does not, in fact, dare follow. One is labelled 'extreme socialism', although it scarcely differs from the actual behaviour of every government since the war; the other is labelled 'monetarism', as if this were some bizarre foreign theory imported by academics, rather than a distillation of all the pious noises made by every government in power. Good housekeeping is not something which can ever emerge from the democratic process, although it may be occasionally imposed by the International Monetary Fund — hence, perhaps, its new name. So much for the policies. Now for the personalities, of which four appear to be on offer. In this range — although not, of course, in the policy range, since their policies are not seriously on offer — we have two additions to Michael Foot (GAS) and Margaret Thatcher (TINA). These are Tony Benn (extreme GAS) and Ted Heath (modified GAS). So far as their true characters are concerned, we know perfectly well that all four are politicans greedy for power and self-importance with an eye to the main chance. Benn and Heath have it in common that being further removed from any immediate prospect of power they are all the most desperate to get there. Mrs Thatcher is overspending by £10,000 mil lion a year; Heath promises to overspend by perhaps £15,000 million. Mr Foot's shadowy programme has been costed at £25,000 million over revenue, Mr Benn's would cost perhaps £75,000 million in borrowings if anyone were prepared to lend it to him. All four of them promise disaster, of course, but nobody is really interested in that. Let us start by examining the packaging.
Mrs Thatcher sells her particular brand of profligacy in the wrapping of a housewife or village schoolteacher — stern, perhaps, even unpopular, but we all know she is right to make these thrifty noises. Mr Foot appears as an angry elder statesman, who knows that overspending has always worked in the past, and we all know he is right to insist on it again. Mr Benn appears as a visionary Scoutmaster with inner certainties which everyone of good will must eventually come to share. Mr Heath is the Man of Integrity who has always been right in everything he has ever said or done. We may not like him much but we must respect him for his fantastic integrity and superior know-how. As he sticks to his lonely path of integrity we will come round to seeing that he was right all along. In an important policy statement to the Jimmy Young Show last week he said: 'I am not going to be intimidated, whether it is the press, Daily Mail leader writers or battling brigadiers with their stinking abuse.'
At any rate, that is what the Daily Telegraph reported him as saying. Sad to say, I was not listening to the Jimmy Young Show. The Times had a slightly different version: 'I am not going to be intimidated, whether it be from the press or the battling brigadiers who send me Stinking letters. I do not mind. There is no need to write. I am going to tell the country plain home truths which the great majority of people recognise.'
Perhaps the great majority of people has forgotten that Mr Heath spent most of his political life wriggling like a jellied eel, leaving an economy which he inherited in surprisingly good shape from Mr Jenkins in 1970 virtually ruined by February 1974. From any policy point of view, Mr Heath's candidature must be seen as a joke. His policies are quite plainly opportunist as they are discredited and doomed to failure. He can only hope to be taken seriously on his personality, that is to say on the image he has chosen to project of himself. Let us concentrate on that.
`If you have contrary views, without indulging in personalities which I have never done, then you are disloyal, wet and squeezed out.' Disloyal, wet and squeezed out. Hmm. Or wet, squeezed out and stinking, perhaps. The tragedy of Heath is that he has never come to terms with his own unattractiveness. If he could recognise this important factor, and even make a few jokes about it, we could probably be prepared to eat out of his hand. I am convinced that it is the most significant aspect of his political character and one which has been ignored by the Conservatives as much as by himself. His only legacy as Prime Minister — apart from an economy in ruins, which would probably have happened in any case — is that the Conservatives firmly believe they would lose in any head-on fight with the unions. This is simply because Heath lost, and everybody has forgotten how unattractive Heath was in his Woolworth's suit of armour and peppermint lance. Others might easily win where he lost, but the Conservatives are too timid to see it.
On the evening of Mr Heath's appearance on the Jimmy Young Show there were some really spectacular race riots in South all, apparently provoked by white skinheads determined to make trouble with the Asian population. On Sunday a skinhead spokesman — in fact no less than Mr Gary Birtles, features editor of the 'Oi' weekly musical newspaper Sounds — was quoted as saying that the skinhead movement was, in his considered view, 'part of white workingclass culture'.
Of course Mr Birtles is right, although I do not see that the movement is any more admirable for that. Mr Heath was right, too, when in the course of his speech on Wednesday he intimated (although not so eloquently as Enoch) that he thought he saw the Tiber foaming with much blood. There is an air of restiveness among sections of the lower classes, a craving tor violence, although I should guess that outbreaks of violence are attributable to the wetness of the legislative, judicial and administrative sectors as much as to anything else. But when Heath talks of a return to consensus as his Grand Alternative Strategy he is talking of a consensus between government, unions and industry. Nobody outside his tiny world is likely to be much impressed by this because we all know that the unions are too stupid and too political to countenance any such arrangement, as well as being too uncertain of their members to be able to deliver it, while employers and government are too terrified of the unions to press any useful conditions.
But he ignores the much larger consensus which is outside the political system and power structure altogether. This consensus, which manifests itself in various arbitrary and irrational ways, extends through skinheads, police and blacks, 'workers' and unemployed, to those thinking people — teachers, philosophers and journalists — who form the flower of the nation. If this consensus ever makes itself felt, all four of them, with their rotten policies and hopeless personalities, will find themselves dangling from the same gibbet.
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